This Wednesday and Thursday I’m very excited to be running a demo of my final PhD project, something I’ve spent the past few months designing, building and testing. The project is a Smart Pop-Up Wine Shop, a shop that learns from its customers’ behaviour and recommends wines based on their popularity.
Smart Pop-Up Wine Shop Invite(function() { var scribd = document.createElement(“script”); scribd.type = “text/javascript”; scribd.async = true; scribd.src = “/javascripts/embed_code/inject.js?1300479309″; var s = document.getElementsByTagName(“script”)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(scribd, s); })();
The focus of my research is the design of smart products and services and how these may change people’s behaviour. As computers become ever so small and disappear inside walls, tables and many everyday objects the way we interact with information changes radically. Like footprints in the snow our encounters with smart objects and spaces leave a permanent mark in the information substrate. From these traces smart artefacts can learn how, when and where they are used, and can react to that information.
Using collaborative filtering, a branch of artificial intelligence frequently used by online retailers, the Smart Pop-Up Wine Shop recommends the most popular wines as well as favoured purchase combinations by learning from its customers. Lights integrated in the shop’s furniture indicate the popularity of each wine using a colour scale. Additionally visitors can scan each bottle to see what others bought in combination with it, creating a real world version of the famous “users who bought this also bought†system popularised by Amazon.
Image may be NSFW.
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After a 5 week trial with over 100 participants conducted in February 2011 at the Pervasive Interaction Labs at The Open University, the Smart Pop-Up Wine Shop will be installed for a demonstration in central London, at Arup’s Phase2 Gallery on number 8 Fitzroy Street.
I’ll be personally attending the shop from 10 am till 7pm. If you’re interested in Interaction Design, Ubicomp technologies and services, Recommender systems please come by, would love to have a chat.
