Next & More is the web platform of design explorer Martin Ludvigsen.
I am working as an Associate Professor in interaction design and as a Business Consultant to push the edges of design and innovation.
Next & More is my company, web page, blog, and personal think tank, containing the various lines this exploration takes.
My main research focus is on the iSPORT project where I am leading the exploration towards designing and developing better user experiences within three topics:
- Elite athletes and training equipment for developing kinesthetic empathy, or better performance in direct man-to-man combat
- Developing better audience experience at sporting events through interaction design
- Developing new interfaces for fitness and sports in schools and non-elite environments
Through all three topics the focus is on developing technologies for movement and supporting bodily interaction.
I am currently working with Glubbin to develop their overall user experience.
Glubbin is an interesting mobile IT upstart, who have created and about to launch a mobile service for the Night-Life people. With their service you can pay entrance and get VIP treatment in the clubs that are part of their network.
Recently I have been receiving news and questions from people who are staring to use parts of my dissertation work. This is fantastic, since when you write such a thing you will inevitably at some point wonder if anyone will ever read this stuff - apart from the comitee and your advisors.
First I was contacted by Therese Hansen, a student from the computer science department at University of Aarhus, who was doing something with social software for her master thesis work. Here is her post about it - in Danish. She is using my frame work describing different levels of social interaction to be designed for, and interestingly enough she has given it a name: DSDC from them beginning letter of each of the four levels: Distributed attention, Shared focus, Dialogue and Collective action. And here I had just called the framework “levels of social interaction” plainly without thinking about the branding effect of giving a framework a real name. so DSDC it is - and hooray for user participation. Therese and I met to talk about the framework and round a few design ideas. She is now experimenting with an integration of wordpress and twitter, as can also be seen in her blog, and she might be aiming this mashup to profesional conferences.
I guess I should make a page explaining the key features of the DSDC framework…
A few weeks later George Por told me he is working with a colleague on a working paper about collective learning and the collective learner, in which he is using one of the other key concepts in the dissertation: the collective user. The collective user is a way to describe a shift in focus in the design process. Normally a social design concept, service etc. would be aimed at a single user participating in some kind of social process (at certain levels - DSDC :-) ) The concept of a collective user twists the idea of the user away from the individual towards a focus on the social gathering as a whole. As an example you could design a service for the whole family - its dreams, goals and needs - instead of designing the service for the individual family members. This shifts a different set of design objectives into the foreground. Basically introducing collectivity and interaction beyond individuality is going to be one the next interesting things of this social web (2.0) that is emerging right now.