jamin.org

in progress

When people switch jobs, move to a new city, start school, or have a child, aspects of their identity change. For designers, this presents an opportunity to help people invent and discover who they would like to be in their new roles. But there is little evidence of design attempting to support this behavior. By looking at one of these groups (incoming college freshmen) I am developing a mobile application called MetaMe that allows students to project meta information about themselves in the physical environment and adjust that information to project and prototype aspects of their identity in order to get to a more desired self.

This work is in progress. It was submitted to CHI 2008 Work-in-Progress (declined) and has also been submitted to Design and Emotion 2008.

Advisors

• Shelley Evenson
• John Zimmerman

Process

Interviews were conducted in students’ rooms to see how they expressed their identity through their artifacts.

Research was documented on large boards to visualize the findings.

Me, taking notes during a participatory design session.

Participatory design session where participants were asked to visualize their social network.

Early sketch for a concept scenario.

Example concept scenarios.

Visualization of some of the survey results.

Visualizing the concepts against the main themes.

Prop used during a concept validation session where participants were asked to enact scenarios.

A participant enacting a scenario.

A representation of ambient information during a participatory design session.

“The System” of the MetaMe concept as understood by a design session participant.

After 13 weeks of working with the UPMC Neurosurgery Clinic, direct by Dr. Amin Kassam, we have decided to produce a small communication design piece. Compared with other projects, which have mostly focused on technological solutions, producing a booklet feels a little uncomfortable. I catch myself thinking, “This is it?”

Well, actually it’s not. In addition, we are also providing the clinic with a design guide that outlines our research, observations, insights, and possible concepts that they can reference as they continue to shape the clinic into a more ideal vision.

Service design is a holistic approach that focuses on understanding the service first before introducing products into the service. I see it as applying design thinking to a system to understand what products or behaviors might impact the system in a positive way, with a perspective that all elements within the system, from product to human behavior, are interrelated and form the service.

What this means is that there are intangibles that make up a service that you can design for but not actually see manifested in the form of a product. This is what has been making me feel uncomfortable, as the potential impact of our efforts and deliverables are not easily viewable.

Despite this discomfort, I know the small communication design piece will have an immediate impact on the patient experience and quite likely the way the clinic sees itself, which may lead to further positive changes in their behavior. And that’s not something I would have felt comfortable about without having done all the research in order to understand how all the parts of the service affect each other.

The design guide—also a print piece—will serve to embody the presence of our design team and of design thinking in the clinic. Embody design thinking? Yes. We found that by having us around and sharing our process and perspective helped the clinic staff make immediate changes in the way they viewed their work and the patient experience, which led to behavioral change that we had not expected. The great thing was that the staff would openly confess to being inspired by our presence and perspective to make changes themselves. This is definitely an intangible that we’ve essentially already delivered. But it’s difficult to see without a bit of reflection.

The aforementioned might not have been successful without having formed a good relationship with the clinic staff. This is a key point to service design. The people who deliver the service need to be on board with what you are doing. To this end, involving them in the process early and often is highly important. We accomplished this by presenting our initial research findings with lots of photos of them and quotes from them to show that we understood their experience. There was an immediate change in their behavior toward us after that because they then saw us as their colleagues.

So while the only design artifact we are introducing that patients will see is a small print piece, how it relates to the whole, and the behind-the-scenes design guide, and the other intangibles I mentioned, means that we delivering a lot more than is apparent by looking at the individual artifacts. Understanding that relationship is the point of service design.

For our first project in Designing for Service, our groups were asked to create a service that will foster flow at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) security screening stations at the airport. The two biggest restrictions we had were little experience in designing a service and having only one week to complete the project.

Our team started with five, but whittled down to three after two dropped the course. No worries, as through the luck of the draw the remaining team members were excellent to work with—Kipum Lee, a fellow second year interaction design peer who spent his summer working at IDEO in Chicago, and Kara Tennant, a first year CPID graduate student coming from the world of graphic design.

Since we didn’t have much time to do research, we started with our experiences using directed storytelling on each other. But we itched for something with more juice and headed out to Pittsburgh International Airport for a morning of observation.

It’s amazing how much you can learn just by watching. We stayed for two hours, taking notes and photos. We diagrammed our findings and called it a day.

A few days later we reconvened and determined our design principles: Communicate to Passengers; Feel in Control; Say Goodbye. We came up with the latter principle after noticing all the awkward goodbyes that were taking place at the security checkpoint.

We then created several concept ideas for each design principle, which were captured on card stock so they could be shared with TSA and be something that TSA could share with each other to start having meaningful conversations about the experience. So our service was directed at engaging TSA in a conversation about design opportunities that they might want to explore further.

Each card contains a concept with a sketch and a description and is color coded to correspond to each design principle.

Our work was displayed this past weekend at the Design Research Conference during Shelley Evenson’s presentation on Designing Services.

I should note that this was a project invented by Shelley Evenson, and was not in collaboration with TSA.

Even if you have little time, doing some research is better than none. And a little observation goes a long way to discovering opportunities hidden in plain sight.

Presentation

Another successful aspect of this project was our presentation. We decided to tell the story using the photos we took at the airport coupled with a key point that each revealed to us or a question that begged asking. From that we were able to make the case for our design principles, and from those, the concepts and cards as a final deliverable.

Download the presentation (10 MB)

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.”

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.