Day 5 - Producers (Photo Editorial Content + Prototype Testing)

With the first iteration of my paper prototype complete, I will test it this week. Aside from testing, I will also be gathering content for my photo editorial on the vendors, the foods they produce, how it's transported, how their produce stand is setup... basically I want to capture a complete story of the producer. I went on the CENYC website and emailed some vendors to arrange for a photo opp. 

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Day 4 - Analyzing Survey

I haven't been home to update my Posterous posts so here I am playing catchup. I believe I have gathered enough responses from the survey I sent out a couple days ago. I've received a total of 144 responses (thanks to all of you who helped me with this). Since I don't have a SurveyMonkey paid account, it will only show 100 responses. Well, you guys overwhelmingly (55%) said you preferred Menta Bento out of all of the names listed with many of you suggesting it should be the other way around, Bento Menta as it's easier to pronounce and apparently works better with Spanish grammar. Most of the respondents were females that occasionally go to Farmers' Markets. 

I've received a few direct email responses that really got me thinking of a new name all together. Here's an excerpt from one of those emails: 


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"ook a look at your survey. why does it need to be multicultural, since your project - the function of it, anyway - isn't inspired by that? i remember you saying that you wanted the spanish to be a tribute to the workers who grow/harvest/cook the food, but i'm not sure if that sentiment will come across in your project if the name is the only place where that comes into play. 

i actually think the spanish/japanese thing is kind of confusing, because i'm expecting the project to be about bento boxes in some way. or, you know. 

to me, your project is more about recipe-writing/sharing with locally grown, seasonal produce. i'd play off of season(s/ing), maybe? or the name of a vegetable? co-op(t)? i don't know, just some ideas. you might just ask how much bocalocal.com is worth, if you're really attached to the name.

finally, a question i didn't ask before: who's the audience for this, and why? i think i know the answer to the first part, but not the second. i work at a school in the bronx where fresh food is not available within a ten-minute walk - and it could be more than ten minutes, depending on the direction you're going. i live in park slope, where there's a union market around the corner. this, obv, raises questions about what aspects of it are multicultural. 

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I really like the suggestion of selecting a name that invokes feelings of "local" and "seasons". Season, seasons, seasoned can be used many different ways. Not only does it describe the time of year (season), it can also be as flavouring (seasoned with salt and pepper). Again, I am looking for a name that is not direct and really straight forward. Think of Monster.com (job posting), Jamba Juice (multicultural - Jambo means hello in Swahili), Yelp (a short cry - I like this name since yelp is a feedback website), Mint (money management website), Hulu (internet TV). I don't think obvious names like "whatisfresh.com" can be successful. What if Google were named "bestsearchengine.com"? Probably wouldn't be as successful. A short name that can be also used as a verb, "I googled it.", "Did you yelp it?" is the direction I'm headed towards. 
At the end of the day, I want a name that is easy to remember and fun to say, a name that only hints at what it offers. Bento to me is memorable and fun to say, it has a lot to do with food, and the compartmentalized nature of bento boxes remind me of how you can combine the different local ingredients of my drag and drop interface to create your own recipes to share with others.

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day 5, the powerpoint mockup

Inspired by David Byrne's Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information, Tufte's The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint and Danielle Aubert's Excel art, I spent yesterday playing in PowerPoint. I'm going to try to mock up the book in PowerPoint, to investigate how/what I can move PowerPoint-ness into physical form. I'm thinking about how to build in some kind of prohibition against "skipping ahead", which is a privilege you can exercise in a physical book but not in a PowerPoint (at least, not without seeing the slides in-between). Also thinking about size - my earlier version of the ppt book was too small, and I'm thinking I should scale up. Screenshots later today.

christina

Day 5: Meeting of the Minds

Athlethic2

Today was an extremely influential day for me. I met with Beth and had an incredible time conversing about my thesis idea and potential for a business partnership with one another. She has an undergraduate degree in business and considers herself someone with a very 'entrepreneurial mind.' I'm still trying to unpack everything we discussed today.

I have to share one story (mythology) from today's meeting as I keep thinking about it. The insulin pump that she is on (medtronic minimed) is similar in shape to old-school pagers. However, it's like  a pager attached to a small tube that is then attached to the body through an infusion site. One of Beth's first questions to me was "So, do you have a boyfriend?" and she continued to discuss her anxieties about the pump being "not sexy at all." There is a lot of difficulty in concealing this device on the body. While much of my thesis is about abandoning this notion of concealment - - I still do it, as most diabetics do as well. Perhaps through this process I can change this reality. Anyway, so many women who use this pump keep it located in their bra, in between their breasts - - this is where Beth usually stores it and it is where I put it as well during the time I wore it. She told me a story of a girl she knew who actually got breast enhacement surgery for the purpose of keeping the pump discreet and hidden between her breasts. Wow. What does it mean when people begin to modify their body because of a medical device? What does that say about the design of this device? This kind of story is both incredibly sad as well as encouraging in the sense that I think my project has more urgency than I thought before today. Through this process I'm beginning to learn that there are simple solutions for very big problems, this is what Chikara addresses as well.

For today's post I want to address the project direction I'm thinking of for her. She is a very athletic person and finds most of her issues with the pump associated with situations that are athletic in nature. The pump that she is on is one I am very familiar with and she is struggling with the exact same issues I had while living with it on my body. She is a person that wants to be more discreet with the integration of the pump with the body. I think this is a valuable exercise for me as it represents a huge population of Type 1 Diabetics. A few ideas we discussed were the addition of special pockets to athletic clothing such as a sports bra or yoga pants. I'm still interested in ways to incorporate a larger narrative in the designs. Perhaps the design can be more internal and introspective, but still a psychologically reinforcing one. Maybe the pocket, while internal, has imagery on it that helps reinforce the idea that she is part of a greater community.

I have so much more to share about my meeting today, but this will be it for now.

Sketching out all Visualizations

After going over in my head yesterday what I'd like to visualize, today I decided to sketch out every possible way I could think to visualize this data and see where it lead. I spent a lot of time looking at inspiration and thinking about what exactly I'm trying to show, and I think I came up with a lot of great ideas. I also had the revelation that I was forgetting a level of visualization and wasting an opportunity by not showing all the seasons a team has played as a visualization and using that as an interface to select a season. This is super interesting and I'm sure people would love to see the rise and fall of their teams throughout the years. It will also be interesting to see which teams slowly get better/worse and which have drastic increases/decreases in performance.
Now that I have all these concepts, I'm starting to think of how I can tie together all of them in a way where they each show seperate information but are united both conceptually and visually. I think it would be really amazing if the visualizations could smoothly adapt and transition between views and looked somewhat similar. I have some ideas now of how I could do that and I think the next step is going to be creating real visuals for this.

I didn't get to the physical computing representations that I am hoping to explore but I will definitely be looking into this as well. I'm really interested in how I can unite the screen interface with a physical one and have the user interact between the two.

-Steve

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Sketching Anomic Scenes

Ok, so I'm trying to think of possible scenes to be seen through the view master.
I sketched out some ideas of what would be behavior resulting from anomie or simply deviant behavior.
So I can see this going in 2 directions:
Either choose different scenes happening in different locations.
Or choose suicidal scenes and stick to the idea of The Guide to the Suicide Tourist which so far I think works better.
But now I can see that at least I considered another idea!

-Grace

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new conclusions

In total I surveyed 30 people, most of whom were female and between the ages of 20 and 30 years old. Spanish is the most common foreign language that people speak with English coming in at a close second. I was surprised at the variety of languages spoken; within this small sample 19 different languages are spoken. Another interesting result of the survey is that only 50% have trouble finding people to speak the language with but 70% would be interested in conversing with people online. Most of the people surveyed are interested in conversing with a native speaker about 1-3 times a week. Text and video chatting were the preferred method with asynchronous text and video posts trailing behind. The most surprising result of the survey is that 57% of people would prefer Converso to be a stand alone site, not a facebook application. This is a big factor in the design and structure that I will continue to think about over the weekend. Moving forward I think I will continue building a network-like site with perhaps a future goal of linking it to facebook to tab in to its member base. I’ll be working on some rough sketches for a new interface tomorrow that will hopefully go beyond the traditional setup of a social network. I want Converso to put more emphasis on live interaction and user generated content.

-Hilary

Day 5: Mask, tie, and suspenders

Three more photoshopped prototypes. 

Both in the critique and at the one-on-one meeting, Cynthia suggested turning my original eye contact dartboard into something more like a mask that can be worn by the listener (person the user is speaking to). In my mind, the mask would be made of some kind of clear or translucent material, so that it doesn't create a physical barrier. The first image is what this eye contact mask might look like as a face "masque." It's thin, it shapes to the contours of the face, and it's see-through.

Ties and suspenders are also part of the family of formal corporate attire. The chain-and-ball tie and the arm band suspenders are both tools to help correct posture by pulling the neck and upper torso back. 

Tomorrow I'm doing some supply shopping so I can build some rough physical forms to (maybe/hopefully) bring to class on Tuesday. 

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