Last week, Yahoos from company headquarters were invited to lick lollipops that propelled crawling baby dolls, run their fingers through grass to control videos, and observe a virtual sheep market. These curiosities were all part of University Design Expo 2006, a program sponsored by Yahoo!’s User Experience & Design (UED) group and Yahoo! Research to encourage and stimulate out-of-the-box thinking.

We called on students from five universities around the world to propose some innovative design prototypes for future-facing social, mobile, and media experiences. Teams from leading graduate design programs at New York University, London’s Royal College of Art, UCLA, ESDI Graphic Design in Brazil, and California College of the Arts came to present their work. The result was a series of very unusual yet inspiring designs that illustrate future uses and user desires for technology services and devices — some more far-out than others. Marveling right along with me were legends of the design world, including Don Norman, author of “The Design of Everyday Things,” and Peter Merholz from Adaptive Path, a premier user experience consulting company. Incidentally, he’s also the man said to have birthed the term “blog.”

The program is the brainchild of Joy Mountford, who recently joined Yahoo! as senior director of UED. She dreamed up the concept 17 years ago at Apple and then took the program with her to Interval Research, Microsoft, Mattel and now here. Joy estimates that about 1,800 students have participated since its inception.

In “Edible Interface: The Lick Races” project, students embedded photo sensors into lollipops that were used as event triggers to race toy babies — the faster I licked, the faster my doll crawled to the finish line. Another student created “Feelers,” which allowed me to experience nature through the eyes, body, and mind of an insect via motion sensors embedded in fresh grass. Every time I touched the grass, a toy insect changed path and software sensing my touch chose different video and audio to play.

Other student projects included “(Geo) Phone Tag,” which allowed mobile phone users to leave and retrieve contextually relevant messages about points of interest in their vicinity. “Chatsum” gave users a way to chat with other people while looking at the same web page. The “Sheep Market” leveraged Amazon’s Mechanical Turk system to employ thousands of Internet workers and create a database of 10,000 sheep drawings that were bought and sold. “Deadends” used the online-map interface to trace dead-end streets in L.A. and let people email videos or photos of dead-end streets through their camera phones. Here’s a short video of some of these inspiring prototypes and check out the Flickr photo set.

After the tent came down, I had a chance to sit down with Joy to get her thoughts on the event, the status of design today, and the next generation of designers. Catch our conversation here.

Larry Tesler
VP of User Experience & Design