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CMU has a news story in its Corporate Visitors section regarding the studio 2 projects with Shelley Evenson we did this past spring in collaboration with Motorola. It includes a definition of interaction design by Shelley, and a synopsis of each group’s concept.

Notable is the article’s focus on interaction design, referring to the studio course as the “annual graduate studio in interaction design,” even though their were folks from the communication planning and information design program (CPID).

But also important is Motorola’s desire to share the projects within the company and continue to strengthen its ties to CMU.

“We wanted to bring people back to Motorola to show off the results,” [Rick] Hoobler, [Motorola design manager in experience planning and design,] said, “[everything was] received very well.” He went on to say that the concepts are continuously being shared across the company.

In addition to dipping into the campus think tank for creative ideas, Hoobler said that Motorola also hoped to broaden their relationship with Carnegie Mellon and to recruit more from the university in the future. As a School of Design alumnus, he knows the quality of thinking and dedication to excellence that the school has to offer and his prior relationship with university faculty lent a critical hand to the partnership. And based on the exceptional performance of the class, recruiting from the program will certainly continue. “We feel like there’s a good synergy between our design group and the school,” Hoobler said, “and we’re looking forward to bigger and better things.”

The New York Times reports Motorola is struggling.

The management of Motorola, the ailing mobile phone maker, has promised to turn the company around. Instead, Motorola’s troubles worsened yesterday when it announced that sales would fall considerably short of earlier projections and forecast a quarterly loss.

Mr. Zander has said Motorola’s struggles reflect a handful of factors, including a strategy of building market share by selling relatively inexpensive phones, instead of putting more emphasis on developing new high-end, highly profitable models.

This is what my mobile media team told them in February after the exploratory research. The idea that they were selling inexpensive phones hit a nerve.

I wonder what they’re doing with the concepts the CMU graduate design students gave them.

Interestingly, the articles does not mention the iPhone.

I volunteered to give brown bag presentation at Adaptive Path on the mobile media research and concept my team did for Motorola last semester. I really didn’t know what they would think.

The most conversation centered around the value of the scenario video sketch versus a lower fidelity demonstration of the concept. Jesse James Garrett seemed particularly interested in whether I thought the effort put into the production was worth the payoff. I said yes.

Why? Because real people, sound, and a story are more compelling that cartoons.

Incidentally, the same day Jared Spool talked about Apple’s Knowledge Navigator video vs. cartoon scenarios.

“When choosing a presentation format, you’ll want to choose the technique you’ll find easiest to work with. As long as the final product tells the story of user’s ideal experience, you’ll produce a successful envisionment.”

I don’t know about that. Given two equal concepts, the higher fidelity presentation will win over the lower fidelity one. But as an interaction designer, do you have the time or ability to produce something beyond a cartoon experience?

Another question: Can a well-produced presentation give greater weight to a concept that is not as good as another concept that isn’t presented as well? In grad school I’ve seen some nice presentations that impress for their quality, but not so much for the concept, and vice versa.

Perhaps I’m jaded by the competitive nature of my peers and high expectations we have of ourselves at CMU. I have several times gone against Jared’s recommendation above that I choose a technique that I found easiest, instead choosing the one I thought was going to be the most successful, even if it meant I had to teach myself something new.

The goal for me is to have a kick-ass concept coupled by a kick-ass presentation. I don’t see how cartoon scenarios can compare to a good video sketch in communicating the experience.

On Friday, representatives from the four Studio 2 teams presented our mobile media life projects to Motorola in Chicago. Carrie Chan and I had the honor of giving our team’s presentation.

The morning started off slow, as there were a lot of problems getting all of our presentations onto one of the Motorola laptops. Motorola used NetMeeting so the presentations could be viewed by a remote group of designers on another floor. I’ll spare you all the frustrating details, but it took about two hours to get everything working, and even then things were not all squared away. For instance, the remote viewers could not see our video portions.

(our team name was Red Kangaroo, which is why we named it the MotoRoo)

During our presentation, the sound would not play for our Flash scenarios. So I had to talk through them. This actually turned out to be a good thing as I could focus more on particular aspects of the interface and explain things that might have sped by too quickly in the actual video sketch.

I’m not sure if it was because Carrie and I both slept before this second take or what, but the presentation seemed to go better this time around. And we received a fair amount of questions afterward, which I took as a sign that people were engaged (though we received a lot of questions the first time around as well).

As I’m going to Chicago to present our final Studio 2 presentation to a different set of folks at Motorola, I am done with Adaptive Path for the week. That means my first two weeks at AP are behind me.

So what have I been up to? Not too much. But I don’t say that as a complaint.

Being a small consulting company, AP works on a variety of projects with different time lines. Some projects have recently ended, others are now beginning. I seem to have caught them in the middle.

What’s great is they are very open with what’s in the works and how all the projects are going. Each week they meet as a company to talk about what’s going on. Transparency is the norm and very different from other places I have worked.

This week I started to get involved with a few projects. Mostly I sat in on meetings and observed. In fact, while I haven’t been doing any designing yet, I have been doing lots of observing. I find just being at AP educational. I can’t help but compare their practices with the startup I worked at in the late 90s and my own business.

Earlier in the week I sat in on a meeting with a new client that was particularly interesting. While I can’t say much about it, I appreciated the teams’ interaction with the client. I get the sense that AP is not about holding the client’s hand. They will tell it like it is, which I prefer to deferential layers of bullshit.

I also appreciate their client selection considerations. They definitely do not take on clients for the sake of making money. And anyone in the company can veto a client.

Some other more intern-y things to report are they set up a tour of Anchor Steam brewery later this month during the week in the middle of the day. And they’ve arranged a field trip to Google to meet the folks behind the Google Analytics redesign.

Also, I offered to share my Studio 2 team’s Motorola concept and I’m now tentatively scheduled to present during one of AP’s weekly brown bag lunches in a couple weeks.

Mobile Media Life was a collaborative project with Motorola to explore imaging, communicating, visualizing, and viewing in everyday life. The goal was to help people become skilled at enjoying, producing and interacting with rich media at work, school, or play thorough new interfaces and services on mobile devices.

This purpose of this project was to design the concept for a consumer product that Motorola could develop and deliver to market within the next five years. The product is to be designed for people living in the United States and between the ages of 13 and 25. It should give people new opportunities to experience media on mobile devices.

Our Solution: Motoroo

MotoRoo is a touch-screen mobile phone coupled with a service that allows members to share media. Users can see what media their friends are watching or listening to, and they can also access this media through the phone. This allows friends to share their television, music, internet, and video preferences in an interactive way.

Users are also able to view or listen to media together, and interactive video and text enhance this experience.

Team

• Carrie Chan
  Interaction Design
• Melissa Clarkson
  Communication Planning & Information Design
• Jamin Hegeman
  Interaction Design
• Carisa Sirak
  Business Administration

Process

Research included in-home interviews.

Diagramming our research findings to discover patterns and opportunities.

Artifact produced during a participatory design session where participants were asked to model the self.

Participatory design social networking map.

Sketch from a concept scenario.

Wireframes documenting a particular scenario flow.

Just a brief note to say I recently accepted an offer to work at Adaptive Path over the summer. I’m super excited to experience what they’re all about and check out San Francisco. I start the end of May and finish in early August. Should be a good time.

In other news, my illness has not subsided. We presented our generative research and initial mobile media concepts to Motorola today, and my head was so stuffy and body achy that I felt drunk. Nevertheless, I managed to sound intelligible through the presentation (or so I was told).

The illness and the presentation have wiped me out, and I’ve fallen behind on many fronts (like blogging). Perhaps tomorrow will be the day I wake up to feeling well again.

Today we talked about the feedback we got from Motorola on our exploratory research presentations we delivered on Monday. First we talked collectively. Then Shelley Evenson met with each team to provide her feedback.

Shelley said our presentation was fantastic, which my team was delighted to hear, as we did not get a good vibe from Motorola.

Hurray Red Kangaroo! (That’s our team name.)

From 10 a.m. Saturday morning till 1:30 p.m. Monday, my team and I worked on a presentation of our exploratory research for Motorola. Sadly, weekends have become simply days without class interruptions.

The presentation went well, of sorts. The peeps from Motorola didn’t seem too keen on our exploration of the whole experience of a mobile phone consumer: brand; service provider; service. While the team felt like we did some solid research and the presentation itself was laid out pretty well, the response made us feel otherwise.

Regardless, it’s nothing that a couple beers, or a few cupcakes, or a decent night of sleep won’t shake off. Tomorrow, a new challenge awaits, no doubt.

Our Studio 2 course consists of one group project over the entire semester. We are collaborating with Motorola on a project called Mobile Media Life, in which we’ll explore imaging, communicating, visualizing, and viewing media in everyday life. The goal that has been stressed to us is determining how we can help people become skilled at enjoying, producing, and interacting with rich media at work, school, or play through new interfaces and services on mobile devices.

Today a representative from Motorola talked to us about the project and provided us with some background. We also were put into five groups of five. My team has two interaction designers, a communication planning and information designer, a guy from HCI, and a girl from the Tepper School of Business.

We’re just starting out, so there’s not much to say at this point. But it should prove to be an enriching experience.