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Delft Students Invited To Microsoft Forum

June 25, 2004

A group of industrial design engineering students from TU Delft has been invited by Microsoft to participate in the Design Expo '04 in August, a forum dedicated to new concepts for social computing. Six universities from across the globe have been invited to partake. The TU Delft students will present a concept which has the elderly as target group.

Each year Microsoft Research invites a number of renowned design schools to come up with very 'out of the box' design ideas for digital communication. Usually, different schools are invited each year, which makes it very special that TU Delft is being invited to participate a second time.

The Delft team, "team Plus," looked for a way to stimulate the communication amongst the elderly and between the elderly and the younger generation. A special 'school-board' was developed for this purpose, on which primary school children can post questions. The questions are digitized and they appear on a screen that is integrated in a special round table. This table can be placed in an area where older people gather, such as in a home or club for the elderly. A discussion about the questions can then take place. The questions can be printed on a postcard and the answers can be written on the back of the cards. These cards can be deposited back into the table, where they are it is digitized automatically. The children can see these answers on their board.

"We hope that our concept, 'the round table', can help decrease the isolation that many elderly people find themselves in," says Maarten ten Brinke, one of the members of team Plus. "Because of mobility difficulties, the elderly are often confined to a shrinking world, causing them to participate less and less in society, while their knowledge, wisdom and experiences can be so interesting for the younger generation."

The project, 'the round table', was one of the three concepts developed by TU Delft students within the framework of a contest held by the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering called "People to People". The judging of the entries was done by a panel of TU Delft professors and professionals in the field. The jury was especially impressed by the choice of the target group: the elderly in homes and clubs. The jury also thought that the concept could be developed into an interesting prototype, which is important for the presentation at Microsoft.

Delft University of Technology