Since graduting from the wonderful University of Washington, everything seemed to just cruise along. I’ve moved back home over on the east side and it has been the most unmotivating experience ever. It reminded me of why I don’t live here. I don’t really do much of anything except eat, sleep and watching a ton of Food Network. Not exactly the ideal post college lifestyle. Fear not though because it really has only been a little more than 2 weeks since walking down the soggy lane where I was presented my emtpy pleather portfolio signifying the milestone of intellectual achievement, if you can call it that.

Anyways, aside from the meandering, I’ve been spending late nights as usual trying to set myself up as a competitive candidate for employment. Right before graduating, three companies reached out to me and expressed interest in my skills. Teague, a product design consulting firm was the first. The position is a Flash design prototyping position. What that means is I take pictures of what software looks like and make them interactive. Valve - as in Counter Strike and Half Life Valve - showed me around their headquarters in downtown Bellevue. I had the privilege to sit in on one of their design discussions, which was quite interesting. The position was actually one that flexed between a lot of responsibilities, but their immediate needs were in marketing and communication (web design). Last to reach out is Artefact Group. This small firm helps software comapnies like Microsoft conduct research and create prototypes of how execution should be accomplished. There are only 11 or 12 people (I was told both) and about a year old. However, the experience in the house per person is anywhere between 5 to 10 or more years. The position I would primarily be researching people and how we can integrate software into their lives without frustrating them (read: Apple).

Each place has been extremely impressive and it’s great to know that there is so much talent in Seattle. It’ll be a hard decision to make no doubt. My professor, Axel, is happy to hear that I’ll still be in town so it’s also good to know I have his support.

Wednesday I’ll be flying out to Amsterdam meeting up with Richard aka “Giggles” Paterson and two other hooligans to experience what everyone should experience, life. Ha. I just picked up the last of the supplies I needed before venturing off into manhood and I plan to keep everyone informed of the misadventures via this blog. I’ll be creating an RSS feed for those who need’em, but otherwise, this will be showing up on Facebook anyways for the majority of my readership, all -9 of you. Be sure to check up on my Flickr account too. I’m going to try to do some moderate uploading as the days pass, but not too much since I need to take more than share for the time being.

Otherwise, I will hoepfully be seeing a lot of you when I return August 5th to share forgotten stories and and photos that would make any man cry.

One final though: I miss school already, I miss the house and I can’t wait to move out into my own place.

Updated
Here is the RSS feed to any and all entries to my time abroad: Travel Log [Yahoo Pipes]

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

Again, I’ll post some stuff on our earlier work to keep the flow going.

In the meantime, here is a snippet of dialog I just had with my partner as I’m thinking about how to visualize aggregated user data (caveat - we want to make our system fun and engaging, almost like a game)…

1:46:37 AM kdubz313: we should do a hang man thing
1:46:42 AM kdubz313: every time someone buys a red item, it starts to draw the hang man sketch
1:46:51 AM pandahachiroku0: lol
1:46:54 AM kdubz313: that’d be hilarious
1:47:04 AM kdubz313: and we can tell them how many times they died
1:47:07 AM kdubz313: so cruel..
1:47:13 AM pandahachiroku0: LOL
1:47:15 AM pandahachiroku0: that is so cool
1:47:16 AM pandahachiroku0: haha
1:47:19 AM kdubz313: haha
1:47:19 AM pandahachiroku0: u know
1:47:24 AM pandahachiroku0: when he said make something fun
1:47:26 AM pandahachiroku0: I was like
1:47:30 AM pandahachiroku0: shit…we should make it a game
1:47:36 AM pandahachiroku0: seriously
1:47:40 AM kdubz313: well remember
1:47:41 AM pandahachiroku0: we should come up with a kick ass game
1:47:43 AM kdubz313: we want to keep a positive light
1:47:49 AM pandahachiroku0: ya
1:47:55 AM kdubz313: that’s the tricky part
1:47:58 AM pandahachiroku0: so if it’s a guy
1:47:58 AM kdubz313: it’s easy to make people feel bad
1:48:04 AM pandahachiroku0: they get a virtual chick
1:48:07 AM pandahachiroku0: and if it’s a girl
1:48:13 AM pandahachiroku0: they get a virtual guy
1:48:23 AM pandahachiroku0: to strip for them
1:48:25 AM kdubz313: ..
1:48:28 AM kdubz313: haha
1:48:33 AM pandahachiroku0: c? japanese mind in thinking no offense
1:48:45 AM kdubz313: hahaha no kidding honestly, we were laughing at each other…
1:49:36 AM kdubz313: or we can make a health bingo
1:49:43 AM kdubz313: oh!
1:49:47 AM kdubz313: a social network game
1:49:52 AM kdubz313: where you play connect four!
1:49:56 AM kdubz313: or tic tac toe
1:49:59 AM kdubz313: hahaha
1:50:13 AM pandahachiroku0: nice

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!

The Game Plan

Our team broke up into two main groups: Marilyn had scheduled a focus group in Bainbridge Island (where she lives) with a few of her friends. Her plan was to do some make type activities to get people to share their thoughts on health and wellness in relationship to purchased goods. The second group (Scott, Tojo, Hulya and myself) planned to travel out to Northgate Mall and conduct observational studies in different stores. Our goal was to better understand the ecology of a typical consumer shopping environment and the interactions that go on between products, people and sales associates. In addition, Scott and Tojo planned to contact local specialists on campus to get some feedback from expert opinions while Hulya and myself went on to ask the online communities for some help in answering questions on their past experiences with health and wellness. Last, we were all expected to have at least three interviews completed with people within our network. Mostly people who are easily accessible like friends, family, or colleagues at work.

The ultimate goal is to get an initial understanding feel of what we are getting into and how well our initial vision withstands the real world views of those around us. What we found was interesting, and will only be more compelling as we move into a more focused research attitude in the days to come.

Field Observations and Interviews

At Northgate Mall we made some interesting observation. Here are some bits from my notes:

• Shopping is done at a glance and involves a lot of browsing activity
• Shopping in pairs
• Requires a lot of feedback (ie testing products in store, touching, evaluating, asking questions)
• Brand names carry a lot of assumptions on qualities
• Different ecologies: difference between a store front and a kiosk
• kiosks require standing and very engaging interactions
• store fronts allow sitting and hands on browsing
• Elderly people and boyfriends/husbands spend time at the waiting areas and have little to do
• Read into marketing material and labels (ie “Style infusion” and “volumizing”)
• Using lists to keep track of what needs to be bought
• People go into stores with expectations because of the store name
• When people know what they want, they really want it

The other guys got a lot of great information too from their interviews. Marilyn was able to follow two of her friends as they went shopping at a local farmer’s market while the rest of us did more indepth interviews gettings them to talk about the last significant purchase they’ve made and what it means to them. Our goal was to get people interested by having them talk about something they thought was meaningful. Plus, our intent was to observe the behaviors of shoppers and what they think. This sort of came about after listening to Nelle Steele doing a practice interview with Marilyn. After the interviews, Hulya and I posted questions up in a futile attempt to cast a wider net. Isn’t it like, doing online research, expect 10% in response (on average). Well with an online community of hundreds, 10 would’ve been fantastic! To this day, we got three, one of which is the Chairman for Wellness.com. He was interested in supporting our research and design if there was a way to benefit mutually. Neato. Well, until we figure out what exactly we are designing, there isn’t much to discuss. But we will be looking forward to it!

Information About Data

What did we learn? A few things.

People do care, they only think about it when they are told they did something great.

If Apple told me that buying this iPod was good for the environment, then I would probably buy more from them.

People do care, but the information isn’t there.

When I hear about child labor conditions and other things that just don’t seem right, it makes me think. I believe that if more people knew about this, then more action would take place.

People will find information when they want to. They are their own person.

I don’t need someone telling me how to think or what to do. If I really wanted to find out about something, I’d go out and do it myself.

For those more active, it’s more than just about them. (duh, kind of)

When we go out to buy goods like foods at the market, we don’t consider our own benefit, but what it means to the rest of the community and the environment.

These interviews showed a lot about the attitudes and feelings individuals have around the topic of environmental health and consumption. You can see these also in statistical data found here (granted a little dated):

Source: Green Marketing: Opportunity for Innovation

We see that a great opportunity that would have significant impact would be to design for the “sprout” population. Sprouts are considered as:

One-third of the US population is classified as Sprouts. They are willing to engage in environmental activities from time to time but only when it requires little effort. Thus, recycling, which is curbside in many communities, is their main green activity. They read labels for greenness - although less often than the True-Blues and Greenbacks neighbors. Their greenness ends at the supermarket check-out: even though Sprouts and Greenbacks have similar median incomes, Sprouts generally won’t choose a green product if it is more expensive than others on the shelf. When they do, they are only willing to pay up to 4 percent extra. More than half (56 percent) are female and at 43, they have the highest median age of any of the five groups. Sprouts are distributed evenly across the country. They are well educated, and just under two-thirds of them are married. They comprise the swing group that can go either way on any environmental issue. With more education, they are often the source for new Greenbacks and True-Blues.

The part about more education is key. How can we help educate these people? By doing what we proposed, showing them the immediate feedback that is normally invisible to see or experience because change happens over time. Being able to interact with change will be the motivational factor that drives people’s curiosities and inspirations into actionable pursuits. Sounds easy right? Hell no. We haven’t even gotten to designing anything. That’s where the next part comes to play…

Next Steps

Make a nifty presentation and let the whole class know what we found out! Most importantly though, is developing concepts and design scenarios based on our research after the show.

Next up, concepts!

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.

Thinking without the making and doing is almost useless in the job market, unless you want to work at Accenture or some other big consulting firm. It probably won’t help you get a job as a designer in a studio environment. You’d be better off getting a degree in Humanities; at least you would be well-rounded.

This message should be taken as an encouragement. This world really needs more designers as we live in an experience economy. I feel fortunate that the course I’m taking this quarter is a design studio environment. Personally, I have little to show in terms of work from start to fit and finish. They all seem to end at a prototype phase of medium fidelity.

What we’re going to end up with is a generation of “innovators” who are MBAs in MFAs’ clothing, who can neither create or run businesses like entrepreneurs can, nor design products and services like designers can. It’s the worst of both worlds.

Let’s all roll up our sleeves, get’m dirty and take more risks. Failing is an option, and we grow because of them.

Adaptive Path [Dan Saffer]

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]

The group that did it, XVIVO, do a lot of great work for the academic community creating stunning animations that help student better understand what they are learning. Apparently there is a 30% increase in overall productivity and enhancement in understanding. Kick ass. That’s an amazing accomplishment and kudos to them for doing such great work. The video will also be available at the SIGGRAPH’s Electronic Theatre show for three days.

The Innter Life of a Cell [daily studio]