About Jun

Assistant professor from the designed intelligence group. Background: computer science and human-computer interaction. Research interests: software architecture, multimedia, ontology and semantics.

Blurring the Boundaries

Brief Description

In envisioned smart environments, enabled by future ubiquitous technologies, electronic objects will be able to interconnect and interoperate. How will users make sense of the connections that are made and the information that is exchanged? This Internet of Things could have a life of its own, exchanging digital concepts and values between its members, having an understanding of each other and communicating in their own language. Will it be possible to represent this digital world in the physical reality we live in, providing handles to control and clues to understand, build conceptual models of what is happening in this hidden reality?

Exchanging values between different realities can be viewed in the widest sense. Not only in computer games and other virtual communities we can cross boundaries, also in daily life we are often interfacing with another reality, like the digital reality in many electronic products. As the products and our environments become smarter and more complex, these connections between physical and digital reality are becoming increasingly complex and problematic. Often, we cannot make sense of what is happening in the digital world anymore. As industrial designers it is our job to make sense of this hidden digital world.

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Hollywood principles

This presentation was given at the first ID Colloquium. For more details see IDZine.

“The Industrial Design department has started a series of colloquia, aimed at ID staff and ID Master students. The idea is to exchange information about research efforts and inspire one another through quests and discussion. It is a tight formula. In only sixty minutes three presentations are given. One of the presenters was dr. Jun Hu, assistant professor with the Designed Intelligence capacity group.

Jun was asked to raise an issue that would provoke questions and discussion in the department. For that reason he did not elaborate on the software engineering research he is conducting but focused in his presentation on the various languages that are used within the ID department. He used the so-called ‘Hollywood principle’ as a starting point. His conclusion is that three different languages are spoken within ID: a verbal language (describing in words), a software engineering oriented language (presenting the events in a flow chart) and a mathematical language (presenting the events in a most strict and indisputable manner).

Each language has its own advantages and disadvantages. In order to communicate well within the department, the need for common ground is essential. We all need to be capable to communicate in the three languages sufficiently.”