Redesigning a laptop

AIV is a project done for the Next Gen PC Design Competition organized by Microsoft. This project was approached as an exercise to improve the way you work and share your ideas using your laptop.

Usually, when you are showing something in your laptop to other people, it results in an uncomfortable situation where you usually loose the eye contact with the rest of the people because you are side to side with them.

Proposed scenarios of use

To improve the usage of the product we made some tests using two separate pieces of foam and asked some people about how would they use them to type a letter, to read a document in the subway, to play a game with a friend, showing something to somebody sitting in front of you…. The scenarios main scenarios found were: writing, editing, noting, reading and sharing.

Working on the solution

After the tests, we decided to work on a device with two tactile screens —instead of physical keyboard and screen— that can be customized to your needs: as a virtual keyboard or a digital tablet, and get rid off the physical keyboard.

There would be no need of different regional keyboards because it can be set up via software and the keys are shown on-screen. Language, shortcuts and toolbars can be personalized on screen providing the maximum functionality of the sofware you are working with.

When you want to show information to other people, it can open 360º like a paper notebook. This allows us to place it completely flat on the table showing both screens or in the form of an inverted V.

To change from a working mode to another one you just have to push the on button and it switches the screen setup.

The final solution

Josep Guiu, Brian Oko and Jordi Parra / January 2007