Get Together

Get Together is a service that uses the web and SMS to help friends coordinate social activities. It is designed for collaborating on upcoming events (i.e. birthday party) or to help friends make an event when none exists (i.e. friday night after work). Get Together strives to use the power of social software and mobile phones to facilitate face-to-face communication between friends living in the same city and is designed to be accessible to anyone with a mobile phone.

Research & Explorations

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Being interested in mobile devices, my starting point was a probe I called Mobile Ideas. This consisted of envelopes filled with blank cards fixed to the back of people’s mobile phones. The idea was to collect inspirational and spontaneous ideas for imaginary mobile phone features based on problems experienced while on-the-go.

To explore the role mobile phones played in social contexts, particularly amongst groups of friends, I initiated Dispatch, a day long experiment involving my classmates, their mobile phones and a party we attended. The rules stated that they could not call or text anyone in the group except me. When they contacted me, they could leave messages, status updates or inquire about other people’s updates.

The idea was to see how limiting the way people used mobile phones would make them coordinate their plans differently. It was also a way for me to observe everyone’s communication that evening.

Dispatch II was the next experiment in the form of a low-tech, group SMS prototype. I sent all my classmates a text one Saturday morning saying they are now part of the “Pilot Year Dispatch Group” and any SMS they sent me would be forwarded to the whole group. People who sent the word “bail” would be unsubscribed.

The idea was to see how a group of friends would use such a system and if it would result in any social activities that evening.

Watch the Dispatch videos: Dispatch I, Dispatch II or the abridged version.

Final Concept

Product demo

The final concept, a service called Get Together, is presented in three videos. The first video (above) explains how it works. Core features include

• Group messaging through a single phone number
• Groups based on the time frame & context of specific events
• User involvement can range from being a member & receiving no updates all the way to installing a dedicated iPhone app and website membership
• Suggest and vote on ideas to facilitate group decision making
• Broadcast and volunteer for “roles” to facilitate group collaboration
• SMS keywords to interact on-the-go
• Event web page as a lasting document

Scenario I

This video scenario tells a story about how Get Together can be used to organize a party.

It is Eilidh’s birthday and her friends are throwing a surprise party. Adam has volunteered his garden and set up an event on the Get Together website. We meet several people who tell us about their contributions to the party and how these were coordinated using the website and text messaging.

Scenario II

The second scenario tells a story demonstrating how Get Together could be used on an occasion when there is no specific event planned.

Sid is spending a Saturday afternoon with his girlfriend and wants to know what the rest of his friends are up to. He uses the app on his iPhone to create on an on-the-go group and suggests everyone meets at the park. He eventually catches up with his friends after one of them tells about a free concert.

Prototyping

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I was able to test aspects of this service by creating a small prototype. It consisted of a mobile phone that used blue tooth to communicate with a computer running special software.

The prototype allowed me to setup a group phone number, invite people to that group and let people contact the entire group by sending a single SMS to the group phone number. It also had a few additional features. For example, people could suggest ideas of things to do by sending a text that began with the word idea. Then other people could vote on that idea by responding to that text. If people sent an SMS with the word “ideas”, they would receive a list of all the ideas and the number of votes for each idea.

Further Considerations

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The prototype showed that people enjoyed sending messages to the group, but the costs added up fast. I don’t doubt that if the money was coming out of people’s own pockets they would be less willing to send those messages. But instead of thinking about subscription models, I see more potential in partnering with organizations that would be interested in sponsoring such a service. In the first example it is Carlsberg, a company that should be interested in getting people together. You could also imagine clubs or venues having a similar interest.

Get Together could also partner with companies interested in providing supplies or services for parties. In the second example, people setting up an event on the Get Together website have the option of ordering printed invitations, party supplies or even catering.

The next two examples show forms of advertising that Get Together could support, both through the app and SMS.

Personal Contribution

Get Together was my final project at the CIID/DKDS Interaction Design Pilot Year and was developed independently over three months.

Adviser: Vinay Venkatraman

Special thanks to David Mellis for AppleScript and Siddharth Muthyala for hand-drawn interface elements.

Honors

Get Together was one of five projects that “passed with honors” as confirmed by a group of external examiners.

Meet the Food You Eat

Meet the Food You Eat uses the metaphor of a mechanical kitchen scale to measure a food product’s environmental impact. It looks at the carbon emitted as a result of transporting the food and displays this in terms of how many trees would be required to offset that carbon over one year. The working physical prototype (built with Arduino, RFID and a hacked digital scale) also addresses the future of grocery shopping and product sustainability in a world of networked objects.

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How it works

The scale works by looking at the carbon emitted by transporting a particular product from it’s country of origin to Denmark. Place an RFID tagged food product on the appropriate arm and try to balance the scale with the tree shaped weights. The amount of trees used to balance the scale represents the number of actual trees it would take to offset that product’s carbon emissions over one year. Compare different countries or methods of transportation by swapping food items on the scale.

Background

Meet the Food You Eat was created during the four week Tangible User Interface course taught by Heather Martin at CIID. Given the theme, networking the everyday, my teammates and I were interested in how people could make more informed decisions in their daily routines when everyday objects were networked to the internet.

Drawing on various resources and inspirations related to TUI, networked objects and personal informatics, we chose to use weight as a metaphor for interacting with data around the context of product sustainability.

Just-enough-prototyping was the key learning from this project. Using the scale as a metaphor proved to be tricky as people’s mental models differed more than we anticipated. We also needed a strong visual symbol that would communicate a product’s environmental impact. Placing various cardboard prototypes in front of our classmates helped us solve many problems before we started building the final prototype.

Team members

Eilidh Dickson
Siddharth Muthyala

Personal contribution

Conceptual development, research on carbon emissions, electronic prototyping, programming

Honors

Invited to exhibit at NEXT Exhibition/Conference in Arhus, Denmark
Invited to participate in the Pervasive Shopping Workshop at Pervasive 2009 in Nara, Japan

Demo of working prototype

Prototyping montage edited by Eilidh Dickson

Green House CPH

As a collaboration with Intel, this student project explored the role of emerging smart grid technology in the context of social computing and personal energy consumption. Green House CPH is a hypothetical government program that provides rebates on energy bills to residents of apartment buildings who can work together to lower their building’s overall energy use. We communicated this concept through a video scenario in the form of a mock user research study.

Final video scenario

Background

The theme of this two week industry project was Social Computing & Sustainability and our group focused on the social collective that is residents of an apartment building. We began our research by speaking to inhabitants of different types of apartment buildings in Copenhagen and we learned that people do not care about their neighbors energy consumption because it does not affect them financially.

We brainstormed concepts that would address the question “what incentives are there for an apartment building as a whole to be energy efficient?” but soon realized we needed a systemic change or a large incentive that the government could provide. With that, we decided to consider what would happen if the government rewarded the residents of an apartment building when their entire building met certain energy efficiency standards.

We came up with the concept for Green House CPH, a government sponsored rebate plan for individuals who could work together to decrease the overall energy consumption of their entire building. We sketched out scenarios and touch points that took advantage of emerging smart grid technology, current social web applications, mobile phones, and more. Through our video scenario, set one year after Green House CPH is launched, we looked at new behavioral changes and incentives behind apartment hunting.

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Team members

Jacob Sikker Remin
Yu-Min Chen (Yves)

Personal contribution

Conceptual development, storyboards, webpage design, acting

Travel Global | Read Local

Travel Global | Read Local is a service designed for the Libraries of Denmark to offer in conjunction with local hotels. It aims to position the libraries as leaders in promoting Danish culture and knowledge by making their services available to everyone. At the same time, Travel Global | Read Local allows hotels to serve their guests in new ways and allows guests to have a more meaningful experience during their visit in Denmark.

Final video scenario

Background

Travel Global | Read Local is a student project created during the five week New Library Experiences service design course led by Simona Maschi (CIID) and Brian Rink (IDEO). Defining contexts and design challenges, experimenting with user research methods, concept development and experience prototyping were all key learnings from this project.

We spoke with experts to gain knowledge in current trends, challenges and other issues facing libraries in Denmark and used card-sorting activities and other user research methods to help drive conversations with library users. After meeting several foreigners in the library, we became interested in how library services could play a role with people who are visiting (or have just relocated) to Denmark. Most of our subsequent research took place at the airport, tourist information center, hotels and other places where we could meet people who were just arriving in Copenhagen.

After analyzing our insights and identifying concrete design challenges, we began an intensive concept generation phase. We made a rough video prototype of our strongest concept and after some refinement, we made preparations for our experience prototype.

First video prototype

We created an experience prototype with help from Hotel Fox, a boutique lifestyle hotel in Copenhagen. The hotel facilitated a modified version of our book lending service for their guests and by observing this in action, we gained several valuable insights that allowed us to make more iterations to our service before our final video scenario.

The final deliverable consisted of a concept video communicating the service from the points of views of a library employee, hotel employee and visitor to Denmark. For the purpose of experience prototyping and filming the concept video, most service touchpoints were fully mocked up and produced. A final presentation also addressed wider contexts and future scenarios that considered how this service could work when it was extended to stakeholders beyond hotels, and in countries around the world (which was briefly alluded to at the end of our video).

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Team members

Eilidh Dickson
Siddharth Muthyala

Personal contribution

User research, concept development, storytelling and user scenarios, video production, web interfaces

Right Person at the Right Time - Nokia Concepts

As today’s tech savvy youth begin to mature, how will mobile phones support their new needs? These three scenarios for Nokia explore how a growing number of personal communication channels can support young people’s maturing need of being available to the right person at the right time, 24 hours a day, while setting clear boundaries between social, personal and professional contexts.

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Process

Nunzia Coco and I spent two weeks conducting user research, turning insights into projections, generating concepts for mobile phones and producing video scenarios with high resolution prototypes. Our user research took place at a Danish Højskole where we spoke with several 20-year-old students and a local park where we spoke with a couple of young mothers. After a period of initial concept generation, Nunzia and I returned to the Danish Højskole to show the students a prototype demonstrating how “status messages” could work on a mobile phone. This gave us more clarity about refining our concepts and inspiration for our final video scenarios.

Key Insights & Projections

Speaking with students taught us a lot about how they multi-task with multiple communication channels. For the most part, these young people were able to effectively manage all their contacts and communication using a variety of channels including SMS, MSN, Facebook, email and more. When speaking to the young mothers, we learned how important it was for them to be connected but not necessarily available. Who they needed to be available to changed throughout the day, as did their preferred methods of communication.

Concepts

This scenario explores the idea of using status messages (similar to online chat programs) on mobile phones. In this instance, a girl is setting a status message on her phone to keep friends up-to-date about a party she is planning. Later in the scenario, a friend “pings” her to view the current status. When the friend sends a ping to her, he instantly receives an SMS and is able to see the status of the party without bothering the girl.

In this scenario we continue to explore the idea of status messages but incorporate gestures, GPS and more. In the video, a man enters his office, which is recognized by the GPS in his phone, and his status is automatically set to being “at work”. Placing his phone face up or face down also toggles his status which in turn communicates his current availability to his contacts. For example, when his friend tries to call, she is not able to get through because his phone is placed face down. Instead of leaving a voice message, the friend uses a function in her phone to be reminded when the person she is trying to call becomes available.

The third scenario focuses on the interface to envision on how people can be in control of incoming communication while on the go. In this concept, the mobile phone is a central hub that all communication comes through before being redirected to different channels (i.e. email, SMS, voicemail, etc.).

Team members

Nunzia Coco

Personal contribution

User research, concept development, interface design, prototyping with Flash, video scenarios

PhotoCaring

PhotoCaring is a concept design for an interactive surface that displays shared photographs belonging to residents of an elderly home. The photographs are displayed in a gallery format on a wall in one of the home’s common spaces where interacting with and sharing these personal photos will promote social well-being, nurture identity and will provide a sense of home for everyone in the building. Throughout the duration of this project we made visits to several elderly homes around Copenhagen.

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Background

PhotoCaring is based on the insights gained from our one week user research workshop for which we visited elderly homes throughout Copenhagen. PhotoCaring was designed to address the following three needs:

• A need for social interaction amongst the elderly that is based on common interests, experiences and personalities.
• A need to maintain personal identity.
• A need to create a sense of “home” in the building’s common spaces.

During the two week GUI course, the period that this project was produced, we made a subsequent visit to one of the elderly homes. We conducted more specific research around our design concepts and user testing with paper prototypes. Some of our findings included:

• PhotoCaring was our strongest concept in terms of level of interaction for elderly people
• Photos on different subjects proved to be a good conversation starter
• Anne discussed her dissatisfaction with paintings hanging on the walls throughout the building
• Anne showed us some outdated photos hanging on the hallway wall which contained people no longer living in the building
• Anne showed us her own apartment which contained a wall of photos with notes on the back. Anne flipped over her photos to read the notes so that she could tell us where the photos were from.

Final deliverables included a presentation in which we supported our concept with insights from our visits to elderly homes, an animation communicating how the interface works and a physical simulation in which we projected photos into picture frames on a wall.

Team members

Ashwin Rajan
Jacob Sikker Remin

Personal contribution

User research, concept development, paper prototyping, functional & visual interface designs, Flash animation

Message in a Bottle

As an exercise in physical computing, we created a wireless email notification device in the form of a wine bottle. All interaction is done physically and there are no buttons. The concept was to limit our compulsion to obsessively check the computer for new messages while also bringing characteristics of postal mail to the digital world.

Background

Message in a Bottle was built during a two week physical computing workshop led by Massimo Banzi and Gwendolyn Floyd. Through ambient lighting, this wine bottle will display the amount of new emails from a set of specific contacts (i.e. friends from back home) which are defined in the user’s email client. Picking up the bottle will activate an LCD screen with a summary of the most recent message. Turning the bottle upside-down will delete this message from the bottle and load the next one. Once all messages have been read, the LCD screen and ambient light will shut off until new messages are received.

A key learning from this project was prototyping with smoke-and-mirror techniques. Although the physical interactions with the bottle were fully functional (using Arduino, accelerometers and an LCD screen), the ability to receive emails was never developed. However we still needed to prototype the full experience for an exhibition setting. We accomplished this by building a wireless remote control (a second Arduino, networked with XBee) that could send fake emails to the bottle at any time.

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Team members

Alice Pintus
Ujjval Panchal

Personal contribution

Concept development, electronics, programming

I am interested in designing people-friendly products, services & software and strategies that apply innovative technology to everyday life in meaningful ways.

Prototypes as Games

If you are going to get your hands dirty with a new technology, why not make a game? Here are experiments with computer vision, interactive surfaces and Processing that all took the form of simple, playful games.

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Reactivision Pilot Mixer

As an experiment in prototyping interactive, touch-screen surfaces with ReacTIVision, we designed a Flash game that allows people to mix the body parts of all the Pilot Year students.

Face-Off

An experiment with computer vision resulted in another Flash game in which two people dancing must work together to keep the music going. Two players face a webcam which projects an image of themselves in the wall in front of them. The players take turns dancing, but if one of them dances at the wrong time then the song starts over.

Wii Voodoo

An experiment in using a Nintendo Wii controller as input for a computer. I used Processing to create a simple application that allows users to control a video of myself. By moving the Nintendo Wii controller from side to side, users can physically move me in my seat. Unexpectedly, a sort of game emerged to see who can make me sit up straight and eat my food.

Team members

Ashwin Rajan, Eilidh Dickson, Erlend Kyte, Francesco Mondelli, Hung-Lin Hsu, Magnus Bendtsen, Nina Christoffersen, Nunzia Coco, Tobias Toft

Personal contribution

Concept development, light programming with ActionScript and Processing

PEPY

PEPY is a grassroots NGO dedicated to sustainable tourism and educational development in rural Cambodia. I spent two months at their Phnom Penh office working to launch a new website promoting their adventure bicycle treks and a social network to keep past participants and volunteers involved in the amazing work PEPY does throughout Cambodia.

PEPY supports their educational projects with money raised through bicycle treks that combine adventure and volunteering. This sustainable tourism venture was growing and needed it’s own website, so I helped them launch pepytours.com.

The staff responsible for PEPY’s bicycle tours is made of volunteers that stay for 6 month internships. With such high turnover, they needed a website that was easy to update. They also needed something cheap. PEPYTours.com was built with Joomla, an open source CMS.

With so many volunteers and bicycle riders coming to Camboida to contribute to PEPY’s educational projects, they also needed a forum for sharing stories and staying in touch. We used a free, online service called Ning to launch a customized social network named The PEPY People Network. It now has more than 200 members with hundreds of photos and frequently updated blog posts. Because of so many great stories being shared by past participants, The PEPY People Network was made public and now serves as a tool to attract new people to Cambodia.

Fah Diow Foundation

Fah Diow is a non-profit organization that works with communities in Southern Thailand. Working from their Krabi office, it was my duty to review and redevelop the Fah Diow website in association with members of its Thai team, provide in house training on digital media development and provide technical and creative support for Fah Diow’s community based digital photography and digital video projects.

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I helped launch a new website for the Fah Diow Foundation, focusing on the work that they do with children and teachers in communities around Souther Thailand. Other responsibilites included helping local staff with skills around digital media such as video editing, digital photography, blogging and using web based tools (Flickr, YouTube, etc.).

Record Player Drawings

A series of generative drawings created with modified turntables. While one turntable plays a record, a second turntable simultaneously makes a pencil drawing based on the grooves in the record being spun. The idea was to take a person’s favorite record and then give them a drawing of it.

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These drawings were made by connecting the arms of the two turntables with hinges from a pantograph. I made four drawings, sides A + B of the Rocky soundtrack and sides A + B of the Beverly Hills Cop soundtrack.