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FACULTY

The course is taught by Gillian Crampton Smith and Philip Tabor

Visiting faculty are:

Durrell Bishop
Durrell Bishop gained his BA in Industrial Design at the Central School of Art and Design, London, and an MA in Product Design and an MA with Distinction in Computer Related Design at the Royal College of Art (RCA).

As part of this last programme, directed by Gillian Crampton Smith, he designed the Marble Answering Machine. This device, in which small balls represent phone messages, is generally recognized as a seminal work in what later became known as ‘physical’ or ‘tangible’ computing.

He mostly designs physical interfaces, interactive media, and products. He has worked for IDEO in London and Palo Alto, Apple Computers Advanced Technology Group in Cupertino, and IDEO Europe. He has been a Partner in Designers in Production (rubber calculators) and Dancing Dog (camera interfaces for computer games), a researcher in interaction design at the RCA, and a consultant at Interval Research, Palo Alto. As a Director of itch, he won the prestigious D&AD Gold Award for his interactive installations at the Science Museum’s Wellcome Wing, London. In 2004 he started Luckybite (www.luckybite.com).

He has taught as a Tutor in Product Design at Kingston University, and as a Senior Tutor in Product Design and in Interaction Design at the RCA.

He is interviewed by Bill Moggridge in
www.designinginteractions.com/interviews/DurrellBishop

Tom Hulbert
Tom Hulbert is a product and interaction designer. He has worked for IDEO in London and now runs Luckybite, a product design and innovation company, with Durrell Bishop. He is a graduate of Product Design at the Royal College of Art, and has worked on both commercial and research projects. Tom has been involved in research at both Casio in the US and at the Interaction Design Institute in Italy. His work at IDEO ranged from design for environments to user interfaces. Tom’s interface design for an Olivetti printer recently helped IDEO win Design Week Award 2006 for best consumer product. As part of Luckybite, he designs and develops new electronic and digital products that mix hardware, software and networks. Luckybite also work for external clients in the areas of product design, interface design and hardware/software prototyping – recent clients include Nokia, Panasonic, BBC, Science Museum and Reuters. He is also a tutor on the Design Interactions course at the RCA in London.

As a product designer, Tom is interested in our material culture and the language of ‘things’. For this reason, his interest in electronics is in its potential to extend that language and also in the dilemma it poses to that language. Namely, how do you design electronic products that are descriptive of their behaviour and use when there is no connection between physicality and function? He tackles these questions through experimental designs in hardware and software that explore ideas such as visualising systems, augmenting objects, creating physical interfaces and extending product language through programmed behaviour and applying ‘electronics as a material’.

Yaniv Steiner
Enchanted by his first computer in 1985, Yaniv Steiner started working as a programmer and developer at age 13. In 1994 he joined the Formula IT group as Senior Advisor for managing and implementing large-scale networks. He was responsible for data security at the Israeli Anti-Trust Authority and for various projects in the Israeli Ministry of Education. Between 1998 and 2001 he formed the online radio station theplaystation.org and developed online games and gaming platforms, video-over-web platforms and other web applications. In 2001 he founded the interaction design studio nastypixel.com with Tal Drori. Within nastypixel he develops gaming platforms for clients such as Yahoo, Kazaa and Miniclip. Coming from the world of gaming, he focuses on connecting the computer and the physical world using electronics with popular software tools; his methodology is hands-on prototyping.

He was a Professor at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. He is now Professor at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem; Visiting Professor at Sassari University, Alghero, Sardinia; Director of Research and Development at Experientia, Turin; and Head of Physical Computing in the EU ‘INDEX’ project on indoor air pollutants.