Communication

Health and Wellness: The Ambiguous Beginnings

Starting new projects are always fun and mysterious. The open endedness really allows you to explore crazy ideas and really see what the rest of the team is thinking. That kind of insight is really important, because it allowed me (and others) to see more of what drives our own thinking and perspective.

We just ended with week two and while we are moving forward, I personally feel like we should be further. Other participating schools are under a semester system affording them more time to explore, conceptualize, prototype and evaluate their designs. Our entire class however has less than a quarter (about 8 weeks) to get a solid prototype ready and submit it for official entry into the Design Expo. Not much we can do other than run with our ideas and have faith right?

So far, we have had a few meetings as a group to really dive into the matter and start realizing what we were approaching. Keeping on the same page is difficult because we are such a diverse group of students with all kinds of interests. Since this and other following entries will be strictly on the ongoing process of this course, I should introduce my team memebers. We never actually did an official ice breaker or anything like that, but I have learned over conversation where everyone is coming from:

• Scott Tsukamaki, our resident Industrial Design extraordinaire. He is currently working on his undergraduate and from what I know taking a class with in last quarter, he has incredible skills. His portfolio is filled with amazing sketches, concepts and final renderings that make the future a safer, healthier place. It’s good to have his perspective because he has experience with the physical landscape where many interactions happen.
• Marilyn Ostergren is current a graduate student at the Information School. Her background has been in information technology and a passion for information visualization. Having her expertise and experience will help handy especially during research and conceptualization. Not to mention her adaptability to learn technologies as needed.
• Hulya Akca enables our group to communicate our designs and ideas through powerful visual communication techniques. Studying Visual Communication Design (VCD), she adds on to Marilyn’s passion for visually stimulating and useful information with a solid traditional design background. We are glad to have her on.
• Tojo Andrianarivo is also practicing VCD. His knowledge in best practices in design, design thinking and creativity adds a lot of value to the team. It’s also great that he has experience with Flash as that will be our primary tool when generating prototypes in the near future.
• Last there is myself. While I studied information technology and architecture, I’ve recently (if you didn’t already notice) shifted over to focus more on Interaction Design. This quarter will be great to try some things out like mood boards, context mapping and other methods. Previous design projects followed a more “waterfall” lifecycle which was good practice, but this will hopefully be more inspiring.

Our group formed out of this common interest in developing an awareness for individuals about the impacts of their decisions when purchasing goods (food, services, automobile, etc) and visualize this in a positive manner. More formally:

Choices are always available. Some are just more obvious than others. The funny thing is, those obvious choices aren’t always the best ones for our friends, our community, or ourselves. When we buy a locally grown organic apple, we are supporting the life of a person we may meet one day, and encouraging that person to continue doing what they passionately believe in benefits everyone. The orchard from which the apple came is the same orchard we grew up remembering.

The decisions we make regarding health and wellness have significant impacts both on a local and global scale. Because the effects of our decisions are difficult to see, making the right choice does not come easy. We believe a thoughtfully designed system can raise awareness of the environmental and social benefits derived from better every day purchases and actions through visual representations. It’s time to abandon the ease of obvious decisions surrounding us, and think about how some small changes can put us back in the right direction. By helping others see the potential of their everyday actions and decisions will encourage a sustained motivation for healthier living.

We are not offering to support the pesticide company that is contributing to water pollution in the next state, nor are we asking a farm worker to be exposed to those pesticides while applying them to the trees (farm workers who thin fruit in Washington state have elevated levels of toxic pesticides in their bodies–their children do too 1). But at the moment of purchase, we don’t see that farmer, the polluted river or a sick child. We see a choice between two apples that taste the same, look the same, but vary in price. Our design will help people see their neighbor, the farmer whose children are healthy and feel the greater benefits of making environmentally and socially healthy choices.

1. Thompson, Beti, Coronado, Gloria D., Grossman, Julia E.,et al (2003). Pesticide take-home pathway among children of agricultural workers: study design, methods, and baseline findings. Journal of Occupational & Environmental Medicine. 45(1):42-53

I hope that wasn’t too thick of a read. If so, and you might have just skipped over that whole part, what we really want to accomplish is to encourage people who are interested in making healthier/sustainable decisions and realize the good they are doing instantly. Something that Al Gore has done successfully in his recent documentary, where the frog jumps into the gradually heating water. We want to make that difference more obvious, under a positive light by rewarding better deicions, to those are want to know how they can make a difference.

The difficult part about our current situation is that we are stuck with referring our project around the notion of goods = food. I hope we break that soon as we are now stepping into our research and exploration phase. Our goal for Monday is to come together into our team meeting with two research articles elliciting more information on current spending/consumption habits, talk to two people about when they last consciously thought about making a better decision (if at all) and to start creating a mood board.

As an aside, I have this really cool idea of making an online service where designers can make mood boards online as easily as drag and drop. These mood boards can be composed and shared with others who are looking for more inspirational sources of information other than text, or individual graphics. Could be a good chance to flex some Flash skills.

Anyways, I still feel like our team isn’t completely onboard or enthusiastic about where we are, but maybe after doing some more digging and the creation of mood boards will swing us the other way. Looking back, we should have begun with a mindmap. Those have always helped me out in the past and it’s funny that I didn’t even think about it until now. I’m going to bring this up Monday if I feel like we are still paddling in the same water when we met Friday. It should be expected that the beginning of any project is always a little awkward, just like starting to write a high school essay. So I still remain optimistic. There’s too much talent in this team and our professor kicks ass.

That is pretty much where we are and more to come in the following days. You can learn more about the whole project at the University site here.