Introduction

Openbuilder is a website based on the masters thesis work of Vinay Venkatraman at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. This is a work-in-progress documentation and reflects the ideologies, thoughts and design projects integral to the thesis. It would great if you could give your opinions, feedback and links to further the effort. Eventually this website would act as an archive of open source projects that can be implemented at various levels.

Theme

There are multiple objectives of this thesis investigation, to develop a theoretical framework of how open source technologies can be harnessed for social applications, find how interaction design can play a pivotal role in this process and establish the worth of the ideology through various design projects. In this journey i hope to challenge a few notions of design, develop new processes, encounter and document issues and prove that using open source technologies can be a sustainable model for social development.

Thesis

Interaction design is a rapidly evolving set of activities at the intersection of design, technology and business. The masters thesis at IDII is a year long effort in the 2 year programme. The Thesis provides the framework within which one can demonstrate how the quality of people’s lives could be improved, contribute to our understanding of interaction design—how we think of it, how we do it, what else we could do with it.

IDII

Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, currently relocated to Milano develops our capacity to innovate new products and services. Among various other aspects IDII offers exhaustive curriculum in graphical user interfaces, tangible user interfaces , service design and various industry projects. Interaction-Ivrea, which combines a masters programme and clusters of future concept projects, is part of Telecom Italia's Progetto Italia.

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" Innovation is the fundamental driver that brings about changes both incremental and sweeping. Design can be looked as a function of actions over time that reflect refinement and appropriateness to context "