The Multi-sensory room is a place where differently abled people can retreat. Here, they are in charge. They decide what they want to do, when they want to do it and when they would like to stop. What makes the experience all the more pleasurable for them is that the room is so adjusted that their limitations don’t interfere with either their pleasure or their opportunity to relax.

To provide the snoezelaar with more autonomy and to enrich the Multi-sensory experience, I’m adding an invisible technological layer to the Multi-sensory room. This way a person with limitations can also enjoy the benefits technology has to offer, without having to learn new competences or skills.

In addition to the knowledge acquired doing desk research and talking to experts, I want to apply the insights provided by different media and orthopedagogic theories to observe and interpret the behaviour of snoezelaars in interaction with an early prototype. I will document these findings and use them to assemble a final prototype that illustrates my view that the Multi-sensory room of tomorrow can provide a richer snoezel experience.

Within the new Multi-sensory room the snoezelaar interacts intuitively with a known and trusted environment that possesses the necessary intelligence to interpret behaviour and is able to respond accordingly along with the supervisor.

My aim is to grow as a researcher throughout this process and to contribute in this way to bridging the gap between audiovisual arts and a domain of experiency with a target audience that is often overlooked.

Software used / Skills learned

• prototyping (electronics/soldering)
• arduino
• processing
• knowledge about infrared and distance sensors
• knowledge about UMPC’s and tablet pc
• setting up a multi-computer system which communicates over bluetooth using Processing
• …

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Download abstract in Dutch

Download full document (Dutch)

This is my first skateboard design that’s going into production.  It was commisioned by the Slope skateshop.  The design consists of an urban scene and a skateboarder looking into the horizon.  In this design I wanted to capture what the essence of skateboarding is to me.  The moment where you stop to look where the good spots are, you have a whole different look upon the city as the “normal” people.  You see curves, opportunities to grind,…  In a lot of ways this gaze is similar to that of  a designer…  The world is yours to create, or destroy!

Software used/skills acquired

• designing for an awkward size canvas (skateboard)
• Adobe Illustrator

View the full skateboard design

This design is a commision of someone who needed a center piece for the bedroom.  The design needed to have an African ethnicity to it, as well as it had to reflect my personal style.  It turned out to become a 3 piece consisting of 3 african sceneries.

The different panels have their own color tint and each represent a specific moment of the day (sunset, midday and sundown).  Their style is consistent, thus creating a whole.

software used/skills acquired

• experimenting with ethnic design
• Adobe Illustrator
• Adobe Photoshop

View the full design

The card for newborn Mil Ghoos is a modern take on the family shield of the “Ghoos” family.  I overdrew an old sketch of the shield in a more modern way and added some detail.  Along with bright colors this resulted in a modern and contemporary design.

In case you wondered: Mil has been born and is a healthy little guy.

Software used/skills acquired

• update an old drawing to a modern design
• Adobe Illustrator

View the full  card design

Skindeep is a collaborative project between Niels Quinten, Danny Leen, Thomas Lammers, Olivier Berger and Tom Luyten.  It was realised at the Media & Design academy in Genk, Belgium.

Skindeep consists of two major elements:  A PDA which runs an interactive, touch controlled flash game and custom Electronics that take care of producing small electrical shocks and produce heat.  These two are brought together in a custom made casing and placed on ones arm for a rich interactive learning experience with physical feedback.

This is what happens when you play the game:

During level 1 you are presented with the upper skin layer.  This layer is there to prevent germs and dirt from entering your body.  It is your task to divide cells in the lower region of the skin as fast as possible to build up a nice protective layer.  This is done by tapping your finger on the touchscreen  where the cells are displayed.  If you succeed the germs will bounce off and die.  If you don’t, the built in muscle-stimulator generates a small electrical shock and you lose points.

Level 2 is a little bit further down the skin.  Here the body temperature is controlled by producing sweat, goosebumps,…  Your consists of maintaining the body temperature around 37 degrees Celcius by rubbing the touchscreen to warm up the skin when it gets too cold and blow onto the screen (actually a microphone) too cool it back down.  When you do not succeed and the skin temperature rises above 37 degrees a resistance wire will be activated causing your arm to heat up.  If it sinks below 37° it will cool off again.

Software/hardware used:

• flash
• arduino
• illustrator
• adobe soundbooth
• custom electronics

check out: Danny Leen, Thomas Lammers, Niels Quinten, Olivier Berger

Open module is an initiative of the media and design academy Genk to stimulate cross disciplinary projects and teams.  I decided to go and follow the module of Video/Tv/Movie.

The theme we had to stick with was “borderline”.  This could be interpreted freely.  We translated this to the movie/television world by deciding to work with the problematic of privacy.  After the brainstorm sessions, 3 main ideas were ready to be developed.  1 consisted of building a large box where people would be filmed.  This image would then be projected inside a little box somewhere else giving the impression that these people are small ants in a box!  The second idea was to create a little immersive play where you would have to navigate through a space, guided only by images of security cameras.  The third and final idea was to make (automatic) pictures of unsuspecting people and then projecting these onto a screen, thus making them aware they are watched everywhere.

Setting up a multi-camera system

For setting up a multi-camera system I, the multi-media nerd I am, started coding a rather “complicated”  system for switching webcams in processing.  After making too much compromises in quality, I finally gave up.

Because I was in a video module we were thaught how to set up an analog multi-camera setup.  Rather cool to do, learned a lot!  You can see somse pictures of us setting up and testing out.

Software used/skills learned:

• preparing a multi-camera set-up
• experimenting with a lo and hi-fi head mounted display

These promotional flyers are meant to end up in stores, at parties and shows to promote the local boardshop “Slope”.  That’s why I designed these with clarity and originality as the 2 key words.   I used the existing logo and spiced it up a little with a scribbles in the background, similar to the ones I used for the Freeze buyers’ guide cover.

Software used:

• Photoshop

Skills used/learned:

• Desgning for print (CMYK, 300dpi)
• creating a clear, yet original design

View full size

Pictures by Bavo Swijgers

I painted this munny toy as a gift for friend.  The toy had a blue base to start with, which I decorated with black hectagon shapes to resemble some sort of mechanical snake-skin.  The little guy turned out to be a mecha warrior machine.

Software used:

none

Skills learned/used:

• using paint markers on a non-flat surface

View full size

The buyers guide is an annual part in Freeze magazine covering the upcoming releases of boards, gear,…  I aranged the new products and designed the front page of the guide.  The front page is mainly typography based, along with some details of product pictures.  This was the first time i worked with the indesign package of Adobe.

Software used:

• Indesign
• Illustrator

skills learned/used:

• designing for print
• Indesign

View the project

This design proposal was made for boardshop fishbone.  It consists of a zombie drawing, tearing his own head off and thus exposing his spine, which is actually part of the fishbone logo.  Sketched out in pencil and later traced in Illustrator.  The difficulty here was to limit myself to use 3 colors.

software used:

• Illustrator

skills learned/used

• make a color design, limited to 3 colors
• freehand drawing
• tracing sketch with Illustrators

View Illustration