Industrial Design student projects presented at top conference

Staff and students from the Department of Industrial Design at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University presented three research projects at the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS 2018) that took place at The School of Design of Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Year Four undergraduate student Yang Zou presented his group’s project, supervised by Dr Jie Sun, ‘Tangible Interactive Upper Limb Training Device’ (see video above).

“Our project was to create an interactive device to assist elderly patients to rehabilitate their upper limbs,” explained Yang (pictured below). “We integrated three types of exercise – finger, wrist, and arm – into one device and added light, sound, and vibration to make the exercise more intuitive and engaging.”

Yeah Three undergraduate student Hanxiao Du introduced her project, ‘Designing Personalized Movement-based Representations to Support Yoga’, which was supervised by lecturer Dr Martijn ten Bhömer and began as a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship project involving several other students:

“In yoga practice there are no standard movements,” explained Hanxiao (pictured below). “Specific actions and poses depend on the individual body conditions of each practitioner. We developed three movement-based representations for personalised feedback – visual, auditory, and haptic – during yoga practice.”

“DIS is one of the top conferences on the intersection of design and computer science, and it is quite remarkable that XJTLU managed to present and publish three projects there,” said Martijn.

DIS 2018 was the first time this premier international conference was held in Asia, with previous conferences having been held in: Edinburgh, Scotland; Brisbane, Australia; Vancouver, Canada; as well as in several other cities around the world.

Another project led by Bhömer, Ruggero Canova, and industry collaborator Eva de Laat, was developed from work done for the Year Three module ‘Design for Sutainability’, and investigated body-based design techniques to inspire the development of advanced knitting technologies.

“Since all the projects are based on a combination of teaching and research, I think they are also excellent examples of XJTLU’s research-led teaching philosophy,” added Martijn.

More information on the projects is available in the Proceedings of the 2018 ACM Conference Companion Publication on Designing Interactive Systems.

Above: Hanxiao Du, Martijn ten Bhömer, Jie Sun, Yang Zou (left to right) in the studios of the Department of Industrial Design

By Danny Abbasi
Photos by Haochen Wang; additional photos provided by Martijn ten Bhömer
Video provided by Yang Zou