CIID finished_ ARRIVEDERCI!

I am flying back to Rome in few hours. I am leaving amazing friends, exceptional designers and unique teachers.

I am the curly hair, red stripes dress, girl on the right!

See you soon everyone.

Here you see my final project video:

Would you like to ENROLL in the next CIID PROGRAM?

To all of you who would like to be in CIID next year,

please the application process has started yet!

Have a look here and GOOD LUCK:

http://ciid.dk/education/admissions/

We are Voice

This is what me and my team mates came up with for the service design course, topic “financial life”: We Are Voice service.

See it on line:

www.wearevoice.com

Concept
Imagine being able to gather thousands of consumers together to put direct pressure on businesses worldwide – to meet our needs, to behave responsibly or simply to give us a better deal. Imagine as a business having direct access to thousands of consumers – without having to invest in a costly backend to do it.

Wearevoice.org is a social network, a consumer movement and a business-to-consumer community rolled into one. By joining consumers together in ad-hoc communities, based on similar interests or needs, we give consumers the people power to meet businesses on equal terms. By providing businesses with a platform from which to engage with their consumers, we provide businesses with a unique opportunity for dialogue with and insight into the people who matter most – their customers.

Context
Today consumers and businesses are often at odds. Despite the explosion in social media and the unheralded possibilities of communication, most businesses still struggle to connect meaningfully to their consumers. Adversely, despite the proliferation of communication channels available to consumers, little is coordinated with much being reduced to random rants on twitter etc. Wearevoice.org means to change that by giving both sides a dedicated platform from which to engage with each other.

User Research
Wearevoice was created through 3 different iterations pushed forward through extensive user research and experience prototyping with a wide variety of stakeholders – from the super passionate consumer, to the social activist to businesses both local and global. Each iteration was tested using different props to immerse our subjects in the actual experience of using the service. Websites were mocked up, we staged fictional future scenarios to try out different possible consequences, letters were sent and different design games were played to test our assumptions.

“Every company recognises the importance of their communities but most have no back-end to handle their communication with them. If you can provide that, then you are creating something very valuable!”
- Morten Lundholm, Consumer Experience Research Manager, Lego.

“I think that a service like this would be interesting for any
company that has a modern approach to research and innovation.”
-Andreas Stær, Webmaster, Carlsberg Group

“Before when you approached the bank you came with your hat in your hand – this could change things and have us approach consumers with our hats in hand”
- Jeppe Olsen, Head of Marketing, Middelfart Sparekasse.

“Lots of people have good ideas and want to do good. This could supply the platform where ordinary consumers can bring those ideas to life and have real impact on the world”
- Nadia Pass, Founding Editor at reflexioner.org, Social Activist

HERE THE VIDEOS PROTOTYPING:

#1 VIDEO: http://vimeo.com/10355094

#2 VIDEO: http://vimeo.com/10355646

#3 VIDEO: http://vimeo.com/12203665

Service Design on Financial Life

Last project in CIID before starting with the final thesis and industry project session: Service Design on Financial Life.

This time I am in team with Elena, Jacek, Ulrik and Benoit, all people I already worked with before. You may recognize in Jacek the Human Bee and in Elena the Ideas Sharpener for example.

Our project was a big process through a final outcome, rich of user testing and iterations of prototypes to evaluate/change our concept up to get to the final outcome. As a group, I can say that we have a tremendous group user journey through different stages!

We started with a basic concept:

_Empowering consumers by creating big groups to have better deals with banks and company.

Our first hypothesis was addressing the particular case of people needing individual loans. What if , instead of going one by one to the bank for ask for they money, people could get together to ask for a bigger one in order to get a better interest rate?

Would then people trust the other people in the group, regards their seriousness of giving back the money and do not harm the group?

In order to test this first concept, we build the TABLE GAME and we went to users to ask for feedback. We asked them to imagine they were going to buy a car. First, they have to imagine to sit on the orange table and write on the table cloth all the people they would like to invite for a meeting about suggestions. This part was just to make our user comfortable with the topic of money, relationships, trust.

Then, we changed the table and we start using the pink one. Same need_buying a car, but around the table we told to the user that other people with the same need were sitting. All wanted a car, all needed a loan. Some of the people were unknown by the user.

At this point we asked the user the particular question we were trying to get feedbacks about:

_What if, knowing that you could get a better deal with the bank such as a lower interest rate, you all sitting at this table could ask for a collective loan together? Would you go for it with people that you don’t know?

The response was that all the users could recognize of the great power and potential of a group in front of a bank or financial institution in order to deal for better deal, BUT nobody was willing to share a loan with unknown people. Not even with familiars some of them. Trust cannot be build like that and relationships need to be protected from the mess/dirtiness the money implies.

Only one user said “MAYBE” to the collective loan and that was enough for us to go on with another iteration of our concept, this time building the group on a web platform. That was another chance for our concept to be evaluated by another user.

Same game, but know we introduced the INTERNET…

The Ideas Sharpener Catalogue

The Ideas Sharpener comes with a catalogue of different modules you can plug to the cone to better suit people working behaviors in the HomeOffice. As you can see, each module is linked to a space of the HomeOffice in a plan drawing.

Here you can have a look of the Catalogue me and Elena created.

The Ideas Sharpener_ a tangible user interface for the “domestic working landscape”

After 4 weeks of TUI, me and Elena are proud to introduce our Ideas Sharpener, a tool that support informal working behaviors in the home office, making them valuable and recognizable from the outside.

The user research we conducted with *Anna*, writer and editor,  showed us how the home-office environment suits the emergence of informal working patterns.

She has different times and spaces of work flow and she succeeds in making them compatible with the heterogeneous organization of her house. This allows her to commute fluidly among spaces according to her process of generating ideas. She uses the digital space of internet as an extension of her own working environment, where she can provoke informal collaboration based on coincidences by posting an idea on Facebook and waiting for people comments and inspirations.

When she needs high concentration, she works in the studio, while when she wants to get more inspiration, she either goes to the kitchen and starts chopping vegetables or goes out for a walk. To unfocus first, as she likes to describes it, works as her best way to be able to focus again and  keep on her working flow.

The informal working behaviors she has developed inside/outside of the HomeOffice is particularly interesting for us in the extent that they were contaminated and mixed with already existing household and lifestyle pattern. We believe that this could be an interesting design opportunity to be explored since more and more people, from a bigger variety of work areas, have been choosing to set their office at home, thanks to the domestic diffusion of technology. With our design, we would like to address the informal work flow that this particular group of people develops around themselves, maybe bringing it to some extreme scenarios to stimulate reflections around the topic of the “domestic working landscape”.

For this project, our aim has been to create an object to support informal working behaviors, like *Anna*’s and those users’ with similar tendencies, and make those working moments recognizable from the outside.

To achieve this, we have built a device that could support and enhance the ideas generation when the user is not “formally” working in front of the computer, but in the kitchen chopping vegetables or having a walk outside.

It  consists of a recording device that help the user in the vegetable chopping brainstorm and that could be carried with the user during the regenerative walks.

The records stored by the device will then be downloaded on the computer, producing a working sheet that literally maps all the ideas generated during the informal working process according to geolocation coordinates.

_ VIDEO_ THE IDEAS SHARPENER: http://vimeo.com/10410756

The Ideas Sharpener is made from porcelain and wood, materials that belong to the domestic environment

The Grater module to chop vegetable is in metal and wood. The wood part contains the connections for plugging the cone

The cone plugs to the Grater module like a kitchen robot (blender/mixer for example)

During the exhibition me and Elena decided to stage the Ideas Sharpener and act around it

Unfocus first to focus more… chopping chopping chopping chopping…

MMM…something popping up in my mind!

Just recorded a thought in the Ideas Sharpener while chopping a cucumber

The recorded thoughts can be downloaded on the computer by plugging the cone to the desk module

When you are traveling and you carry the Ideas Sharpener with you, you can protect it by putting it in the inflatable cover provided with a recharging plug

Elena explained the computer application and pdf generation of the “working sheet” to interested people (alias possible users!)

The working sheet pdf generated by the Ideas Sharpener

Thanks to Jacek, Pedro and Isach for the pics.

TUI_at home@work

Another course, another subject, another brief.

This is the month of TUI_Tangible User Interface, teached by Vinay and Richard. I am in group with Elena Gianni and together we will go through a one month assignment around building/prototyping a working physical interface for a particular user that “works at home”. Yes, the brief is right that one: at home@work.

As soon as we started, we needed to do a user research interviewing a user and trying to go to his/her home. Me and Elena, not knowing many people in Copenhagen, started to google/search in facebook/ search in linkdn different kind of professionals that could be into the wanted category: musicians, writers, illustrators.

Fortunately, one user answers us and we managed to go to her place straight away 40 minutes after the email we sent.

I will refer to our really kind user as *Anna*. She is a editor, writer and communication consultant.  After collecting information and pics from her and her place, me and Elena worked on organizing those information and visualizing physically.

“My work happens in my head, it is not related to space and time”- *Anna* said us

How to represent this?

We tried with an hybrid map that maps the spaces (physical and digital ones) that *Anna* visits while working, both for professionally carrying on a task, getting inspiration and resting.

Here some pictures of our map, with places and streets. For streets as well we mean *Anna’s* paths among her working habits that she “walk” through to pass from my “place” to another.

We hope in this way to get more insights for the next step of the research.

The diagram from a top view. You can see the house space (studio/kitchen/living room) on a white paper, the social network/internet space on the plastic transparent sheet on the left and the outside word with red/white tape borders

The way she uses the social network is playful and inspiring for her work: it is, using her word, a “thought tennis”, like throwing ideas for challenging spontaneous collaboration among a huge variety of people

A view of the “streets” as path of work habits from the studio place, where the professional mood reigns

“To focus more, I unfocus first” and *Anna* use to leave the studio and go to the kitchen chopping vegetables for hours in order to be able to come up with a solution for her work

Throwing the tennis ball to Facebook and the social network

To see more pictures, there is Elena Flickr about our project with all the close up pics.

Delivering Messenger Dogs videos

Very Short Stories and the Messenger Dog

For the end of his course, Matt Cottam invited his friends Timo Arnall from Oslo and Jack Schulze from London to give us a workshop about video story telling around the project we developed. The workshop was entitled “Very Short Stories”.

This happened during a weekend, an very intense weekend.

Timo and Jack are expert about prototyping experiences through videos and are really inspiring professionals, as well as very good teacher. I think we have been very lucky to have them at Ciid.

On Saturday, I sketch my concept for the video and set a little model stage to understand the flow of my plot and the spaces involved.
With a little bit of imagination, the furry cone represents the dog, the transparent cylinder the space where the displaced person is physically and digitally blocked and the wooden block represents the refugee camp. The final stage I set up is quite like this…

Timo recorded the footage and Matt helped me in the orange  props for the floor. Matt also acted in the video and moved the dog trolley. A big thank to them, really.

After my butchery style cut, Mary did a great job editing the pieces together .

Below the link of the video.

VIDEO_MESSENGER DOG: http://vimeo.com/8975014

Here some really cute pics Matt took during this process.

Thanks to Matt Cottam for the pics again.

Hi, I’m a Messenger Dog

Here it is: this is the Messenger Dog, as you could come luckily across with in the school garden while me, Matt and Timo were shooting videos and taking pics.

After 10 days of development, we eventually got to try the uniform on 2 different dogs and have some fun with them. The dog owners were really happy to help and they also understood quite soon that the uniform was about “a special corp of dogs”, maybe used for rescue or some kind of aids. I actually think they were curious to have their dog to be part of the project!

Maybe it is good now to have a little and clear summary of the project.

Messenger dog is an informal messaging system for disastered cities.

Soon after a disaster happens, such as an hearthquake, family members and beloved ones could get displaced in the city and in different refugees camps, being not able either to reconnect physically due to the collapsed roads or to phone each other due to the network not working.

In those very first hours of fear and displacement, people may just want to send a message to their beloved ones only saying that they are alive and safe, hoping the same for them as well.

Messanger Dogs can help in recording those messages as video message and delivering them to the refugee camp they are assigned to.

Messanger Dogs wear a particular uniform to identify them, equipped with a device that can record messages, store geolocation of where each message was taken and the time as well. Messanger dogs are trained to sit when in front of a person, so as soon as one of them meets a person, it sits, allowing the accelerometer inside the recording device to trigger the interface software to start. In our prototype we used an IPod running Nada Mobile from Tellart to simulate the device.

The Messanger Dogs are divided into team, assigned to different refugee camp. At the  end of their work, they can come back to the camp, where volunteers will download the video and make them available to the people to browse among and watch. In this way people could get to know a familiar is fine before the formal communication would be restored.

Here you can find a video we developed together with the teachers Matt Cottam, Timo Arnall and Jack Schulze during their weekend Very Short Stories workshop.

VIDEO_MESSENGER DOG: http://vimeo.com/8975014

In the following pictures, you find the very first dog wearing the messenger uniform in Copenhagen (always recruited at the school garden). In the sequence of pictures, you can go through the all interaction with it and the different screen of the display.

The first messenger dog in Copenhagen, recruited in the school garden

The side of the uniform, with the screen and the keypad

The logo of the messenger dog corps

As soon as the dog meets a person, it is trained to sit. The accelerometer in the I Pod detects the sitting position and triggers the interface software to start

Typing the recipient name on the dog keypad, in this case to my sister Silvia

Recording a video message for my sister, hope she has recovered in another camp

Ready to send it

Now the messenger dog can deliver my message to the refugee camp

The diagram of the Messenger Dogs flow in the collapsed city

Thanks to Matt Cottam for the pictures of the white messenger dog.