A lot of people don’t know exactly what I do. What is Informatics? What is Interaction Design? You’re artsy fartsy (wrong, but I do love art, and especially great design). So on and so forth. Well it occurred to me that while I have spent my long summer hours exploring Flickr, it came to me tonight to use it as a way to showcase my portfolio work as of late. This is just a nice little intermediate step to show off something while I come up with a more complete design for my online and print portfolio - it’s just so hard committing to a design that will last a long time.

What would I use this for? Well, for jobs of course! Actually, it turns own that Teague and Valve are looking to contract some prototypers/designers (me) on their team because of increasing demands. On the 27th, I’ll be going through a portfolio review followed by four hours of interviews with the Artefact Group. It should be interesting. They are working with some new Microsoft technology that many critics have been raving about. Sounds like a ton of fun. All three opportunities have something in common that I really enjoy, that start up feel.

Enjoy! and wish me luck!

We worked through some storylines to help make sense of our screens and find any gaps in information. We quickly discovered a lot of complexities with the information we were working with. List creation, inventory browsing and product comparison were all important elements that we need to incorporate, but were difficult to organize. We drew up on the whiteboard a lot of different layouts and screen interactions and came up with some UI elements we felt would be interesting to test in front of users. We came up with sliders to create the boundaries the user was willing to shop in and have the products fade in and out highlighting those that met the parameters. More information would be disclosed as few items were highlighted and given more pritority in screen real estate on screen.

Jumping forward in time..

Another challenge was integration with the physical device we were using: the keychain. How would this device be synced?, when and what does the interaction look like in store? This was something I personally enjoyed because the keychain afforded the event of having lighted shelves give immediate feedback on what the person can choose as a better alternative. However, looking at it now today, it just makes our system far too complex given our time constraints, and lack of testing. So we dropped the whole idea. No keychain. No lighted shelves. Sad story. My baby died, but at least we are making it easier for our user.

Instead of using a separate device and reinventing the wheel, we are going to adopt the usage of club or membership cards currently used by these stores that track transactions. This is practically the same data we want to record and report progress for our shopper.

We’ve presented our first round of prototyping to our class and also three guests from Microsoft (one MSR researcher, two MS product designers). We received some constructive feedback. Reiterating what I’ve stated above, we need to drop a few items. In addition, we have changed our model of being store independent to making a shopping application for Whole Foods. In order to show the success of comparison shopping and informing the benefits of better choices, we need to focus more specifically on a scenario our audience is familiar with. We needed to give them an example they can visualize and predict, like a story. We have our problem, a protagonist, but we needed a setting. Whole Foods will be our new playground from which our design will build upon.

Another bit of feedback that we were already concerned with going into the presentation was our usage of color to inform quality. The colors derived from the initial idea of using lighted shelves to show what choices would be better, same or worse than the shopper’s current boundaries. We had difficulty translating this into the entirety of the system. So we dropped it. It didn’t inform how much a product is better than others or even an absolute value of it’s quality in general. Time to hit the information design books for some inspiration.

We are now left with 2 weeks left to prototype another iteration, make it fairly polished and prepare our material illustrating our process. I have to admit, we have been doing a poor job of documentation. I’ve used this blog as an informal method of capturing some important events. Even then, I haven’t made that many updates. It’s a shame. This week will be dedicated to design and partial documentation - at least organizing how our process should be laid out. I will do my best to update next week on our progress and provide links to past prototypes/sketches/deliverables.

Here are some more at work photos:

Past entries:
Ambiguous Beginnings
Research and Analysis
Concepts and Design

wtf does that mean?!

Simply, it is a metaphor of our purpose. A single pebble dropped into a calm pond, causes ripples to spread further and wider. There is a dualistic relationship here: One is that the change the pebble has made spreads farther over time and reaches the edges of the pond. This is indicative of the change and impact we as individuals have on the whole. Secondly, the wave formation is also a pattern of knowledge spreading. Each educated person will share their insights and pay if forward. As more individuals become involved and active, the more influence will rapid transform our old way of living into something new, cleaner, healthier and simple better.

So back to the concepts and designs.

Our group has come up with two strong candidates. The first being a list making system that uses a profile of an individual to create a list that is used during grocery shopping indicating healthy alternatives. The recommendations would not replace the list of goods normally purchased by any individual, but provide them knowledge of alternatives and details of why it is healthier. There are two components: An online system where detailed information is researched and tracked while the other is the list itself acting as a simple artifact of transferable knowledge. Other similar systems exist, where individuals can provide a service provider with options of food to be delivered to their home. While this is great, there can be more involvement from the user to make it more exciting, educating and useful.

Secondly we have the mobile (wearable, think bracelet, watch, keychain, etc) senor. This idea spins off the notion of boy scouts and their badges that they earn. Imagine you had this keychain where it knew when you decided to recycle instead of trash the can of soda or you decided to ride the bus instead of taking your car. Hell, you decided to walk instead of riding the bus. Each instance triggers the keychain to calculate new values of how much carbondyoxide you are eliminating from your everday decisions. These values can be viewed from an online profile (yes another one, but they are necessary to do anything personal these days, unless I’m oblivious to something revolutionary). Going even further, if these values are traced over time, then trends can be inferred showing to some estimate the awesomeness that you are by being a little bit wiser. Even better, you could possible infer the money saved by not driving your Hummer or BMW.

More to come as we sketch out some scenarios and I can get some scans in to show you all the cool stuff we’re working on. Stay tuned!

What struck me about this whole situation, other than the insane account of the whole event, is how the nation is reacting. First, there are over 100+ groups on Facebook, and probably hundreds more on other social networks that condemn Cho Seung-Hui. He does deserve it. However, some of the few groups are titled “He Doesn’t Represent The Asian Race” or “He Doesn’t Represent Koreans.”

My mom also called me the day his name was revealed. She said:

“..good thing he wasn’t Chinese huh?”

Hmm..

I completely understand. It’s just a little disturbing to be reminded that even though we are an educated generation, we become sensative to these facts and put up a guard, or make some kind of inference. I’m sure when my friends look at me, they don’t see me as a Chinese person, maybe asian, but most certainly as Kevin (er more like k-wong). I don’t want to go into the arguement of this matter but it something that struck me while we move forward with another scar in history.

For those who have read Blink by Malcom Gladwell, will recall one of his vignettes on snap decisions where people will revert to quick judgements in time critical situations. Ethnicity was associated with specific stereotypes and gender was stereotyped in ability.

In any case, this is a sad moment for all of us and we can only hope that we won’t become more sheltered and over protected, but have the right measures to counteract these situations. Maybe it’s time to start training students in self defense.

Thank you Gizmodo for sharing yet another interesting entry on bad ass technology. You have to admit, the scenarios illustrated in a elegantly stitched storytelling of vignettes is pretty frikkin’ cool. I’ve heard Intel is doing a lot of different kinds of work - yes they do more than just micro chips that make your laptop go vroom - and this is evidence of that quality. While I could probably go off on how sweet it would be to just reply to emails with simple voice commands (not the robot sounding kind either), tell your computer to query the web for news reports and updates, automated cruise control and ambient displays that offer just enough attention to tell you your best friend calling about clubbing tonight, I couldn’t help but wonder if this is actually what people want?

There are a lot of instances where we want to do all these cool things with wicked awesome technology. But then, we find ourselves going back to what we were so comfortable with like paper, the pencil, simple calculators and printing reports instead of reading them online. Then again, a lot of the interactions modeled in the video do not necessarily involve low fidelity technology, infact, they require incredible sophisticated technology that has no replacement. It’s still fun to think about though. Enjoy!

Intel’s Video [YouTube]

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.

At the end of her talk, Sara Ulius-Sabel asked all of us, “How do we sustainably get to WOW?” Her point being, we can get to developing products that deliver a delightful, transcendent experience occasionally, but often unpredictably. So how can we get there consistently?

Well, I tried to answer it by synthesizing the main themes I heard over the course of the event, and turning it into a couple of sentences. (Main themes are in ALL CAPS):

By achieving EMPATHY we realize an EXPERIENCE STRATEGY that gets us to DESIGN BEYOND PRODUCTS (and maintain focus when MAKING MISTAKES).

This requires SYSTEMS THINKING (which in return requires TEARING DOWN WALLS), that produces TRANSFORMATION for your MATRIXED(?) ADAPTIVE organization.

Peter Merholz [via Adaptive Path Blog]

Diagrams and themes provided.

MX 2007 @ SF [via Vi]

School has been hassling me for my attention and so far it is winning. The drastic contrast between working at my co-op just 2 months ago compared to where I am today with school is insane. While working in the “corporate” world afforded me routine schedules, meeting interesting people, and not having to worry about any work after 6PM was nice, so is having to learn something completely interesting and engaging everyday and pushing my levels of creativity until my mind collapses during class.

sign

More after the jump

Anyways, my projects have been interesting none the less. In my Industrial Design Studio class (ART 317), we are working with understanding the implications of designing robots and the challeneges they possess. I’ve taken the road of nanotechnology that doesn’t really have too much phsyical design per say, but the interactions are pretty radical. How do you engage with something that you can’t see with the naked eye? So far I’ve come up with some sketches about different ways the bot could conceivably look and operate. Now it’s time to work on a proposal document since Industrial Design isn’t a huge factor in nano robotic production. Some of the ideas are borrowed from other research that exists by Robert A. Freitas Jr’s work on nanomedicine. I’ll share more insights about the physical, emotional and psychological interactions on microscopic and embedded devices later.

Illustrator rendering of one idea…

My Human-Computer Interaction’s (T C 319) team just finished doing some ethnographic studies on students and classroom participation in class and online. We uncovered some interesting trends and comments about behavioral patterns and motivations. Readings by Jonathan Grudin and A.J. Brush from Microsoft Research have also been extremely helpful. The readings discussed the potentials of anchored discussions, document annotations and multimedia usage for asynchronous distance learning. Our project’s initial goal was to suppliment live classroom lectures with a collaborative, video annotation interface of recorded presentations. However, I have a feeling that the scope of our project is going to focus more on group activities such as studying for tests and preparing for papers. This stems from the observations that most group activities (think CSCW) happen when extreme necessity occurs. Who knows, ideas need to be fleshed out in our next meeting this Thursday.

Finally in my Computer Supported Coordinated Work (INFO 447) class, I’m working on a, wait for it… project, on access control mechanisms related to the television in home environments. Digital Video Recorders (DVRs) and TiVos introduce an interesting array of interactions and behavioral shifts in television watching that we are trying to investigate. Some research has been recently put out in past conferences, and we are looking to these exploratory ethnographic studies to propose storyboards and clickable user interfaces address access control concerns. If time permits, we may look more into routines and information sharing.

Movie Trailer

Now that the nerd talk is over, I’d like to point out that the trailer for Ocean’s 13 is out! Even though Ocean’s 12 was a little lack luster, I still love them.

Design News

This is also an interesting article on Cnet News.com about Human Factors and it’s increasing impact on businesses today.

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When user’s have too much control, it could be a bad thing. Some general insights about how to design a progressive learning curve and empower the user. Kathy Sierra rocks. Creating Passionate Users rocks even harder. My favorite part:

“canyon of pain”

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Barack Obama has gone Web2.0! He even has ways to connect to him through Facebook, YouTube, blogs and more. Interesting how political campaigning has progressed.

What The Duck

One Last Note

DRM should die, RFID is scary and long live Free Culture!

Tech Specs for those who like numbers and other marketing garbage

More details and toughts after the jump…

Wide Screen iPod Capability

• Multi-Touchscreen UI
• Coverflow Feature
• Built-in Speaker
• 3.5″ Widescreen

Mobile Phone

Internet Communications

Other Niceties

• Force Feedback Panels
• 2 Mpx Camera
• Built-in Mic
• Automatically Rotating Display (think Canon PowerShot)
• Runs on OS X
• Thinnest SmartPhone Evar!
• Syncs everything (all media and information like bookmarks)!
• Works on PC too!

So What?

The designers at Apple and Steve Job’s vision to make the cellular phone experience easier and more exiciting for you as a consumer takes form today. A lot of the technology that has been implemented in the iPhone isn’t revolutionary, but the application in which they are used is significant. Before proceeding any further, I hope you have a chance to watch the various different quicktime demonstrations that step by step show each capability.

(Hopefully) After seeing some of the videos, you can see that this unit is offering a lot of control to the person interacting with it. Clean icons that are big and easily understood. Minimalistic design. Dynamic buttons that actually give you a touch feedback on the screen! This is significant because with all the different things you can do with the iPhone, the controls are optimized to make it easy for you to use. Think about how many different menu screens you have to click up, down, left and right to just set your alarm clock? It reminds me of an old Nintendo code (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, a, b, a, b, select, start) back in the day. Bonus points for anyone who knows what I’m talking about.

Some features that I particularly enjoy: Multi-Touch Screen, Visual Voicemails and the SMS interface.

Multi-Touch Screen
Hands down awesome. Now I don’t believe that this sort of application can be used as effectively on say, your laptop or desktop, but this could be great for whiteboards and devices like the iPhone. Things like the Minority Report where our hero swipes images and videos back and forth isn’t as usable as you think. Your arms get tired very quickly, and I digress. A multi-touch screen that lets you flick to scroll and “pinch” images to resize photos is nothing new, but has been elegantly used within the iPhone. Applaus goes to Apple for using it appropriately, and not go overboard. The screen also affords gestures as mentioned before in the form of flicks and slides that is naturally understood more clearly. Why use a stylus and super thin, hard to touch scroll bars at the edge of the screen? Just “move” it like the picture was physically infront of you on a table!

Visual Voicemails
Don’t you hate it when you have to wait for the first two skipped messages to hear the third old message, or forced to delete even older messages before hearing the new ones? Or having to hit 7 twice to delete a message since waiting for it to finish just takes too long? A visual list that lets you pick and choose as you will and delete without even having to listen to it is a big step in convenience that the old system couldn’t offer.

SMS UI
It takes the form of iChat, or any other IM application. This is a personal favorite because I always find it difficult to see what my friends and I have talked about grouped together like a conversation. Instead, I’m forced to scroll through the different messages ordered by date going in and out of each text. SMS, or text messaging, is a huge communication method that is growing even more popular. News reports are talking about how text messaging is a new danger while driving, people getting phones with QWERTY keyboards and just the overall popularity has swarmed our culture. It really has become almost like instant messaging. So why not make it look like it?! Oh wait, they did!

Future Implications?

If OS X is running the iPhone, then in terms of network connectivity, then Bon Jour could allow ad hoc communication between other iPhones, or your Mac. Sound familiar? Zune, what? But the benefit this time is that like iTunes, you could possibly share content through a network connection without limitation (except downloading). No 3 day or 3 play rules. Just share! Be “social.” The possibilties are countless with OS X integration and the Apple ecosystem with the iLife suite.

There are some questions that come in mind about how the multi touch may interact with front end web technologies like Flash and JavaScript, but I’ll save that for later. You tell me, what are some concerns that we should still keep in mind?

Macworld 2007 Keynote
Hands-on Preview [Gizmodo]
Close up Pictures [TUAW]

Some questions come to mind like “What it looks like? Who is the carrier provider? What can it do?” and most importantly, “How much does it cost me?”

In short: Looks like an iPod; either all carriers or Verizon/Sprint or through Apple itself; it is a mp3 phone with Apple infused minimalistic design; price points at $249 and $499 (reportedly).

However, I’d like to ask that you really think about what you do with your cell phone currently, what you like about your phone or past phones you’ve had and what features you don’t really use that you thought you would. Leave comments.