With an IKEA table, an old trackball, and an exercise ball we made the word explorable with your fingertips.

(EDIT: If the video isn’t loading here, try watching it at the SAP TechEd Web site.)

Last week I (Tom) went to Bangalore, India with two other Master of Interaction Design students from the University of Queensland to present Globemaster at SAP TechEd DemoJam. Tristan blogged about the project before I joined the Humans in Design blog, and we’ve made some changes to the system since that first entry.

We adapted the system to use information from an SAP system and entered it in their contest. Specifically, we used information from an SAP sustainability report and some historical data on cricket matches against Australia. But the point of the adaptation is not necessarily that we used SAP data. Rather, it’s that you could use this system to explore any geolocated data set on a country level. There were about 8,000 people in the audience, and they voted for our team (Mike Brand, Dave Harper, Marek Kowalkiewicz and me) to win one of the most prestigious enterprise software competitions in the world.

So why is this system relevant to Humans in Design? Well, I think it’s a pretty good example of how we can use engaged, physical computing to make information more playful and accessible. We’ve taken numbers and graphs out of their standard layout and put them on a novel surface.

That seems to excite everyone from enterprise software professionals to primary school teachers. And we did it with fairly off-the-shelf parts, like an IKEA table, an old trackball, and an exercise ball.

People to just look at the data the explore the data.

At the conference, I heard about ChariTra — another SAP system that allows NGOs to post in a “have this/need that” format. It’s another dataset that could be adapted to the Globemaster system. 

Tristan suggested that we could display country and company financial infomation help explore investment decisions.  I’m curious to hear from Humans in Design readers: what information would you like to see around this interactive globe?

-Tom