Developing the Messenger Dog concept

Welcome back to Matt Cottam, teacher of the second part of the GUI course.

He came here with his expert in technology from Tellart, Brian Hinch, in order to make us learn how to use an IPod or IPhone to prototype graphical user interfaces, using both Dashcode and Nada Mobile, the last one being a particular set of tools developed at Tellart to interact with your dashcode application onto either an IPod or IPhone.

The brief Matt gave us was really interesting and challenging: thinking about the hearthquake in Haiti, assuming no internet, phone network is available, we needed to develop a project for that particular situation using the IPod or IPhone as our platform. Of course, we needed to think about it not as a hyper connected phone, but as a hackable device full of sensors and technology that we could misuse or twist.

The way of thinking at the IPod or IPhone in this way quite suits me, since that was the first time for me to touch both of them. I know, I come from the Ice Age…but I am like that. 🙂

Anyway, the first assignment from Matt was to team up in group and come up with a scenario.

My team was composed by Mary and Li. After a brainstorm, we agreed on focusing on one particular idea among the many: the Messenger Dog.

Here it is hour first draft of the scenario. We would develop it further during the course with Matt and Brian.

This is day 1 after the disaster happened.

There are no streets to go through, no way to make phone calls and basically it is impossible at the moment to communicate with people that are displaced in other places of the destroyed city. When the disaster happened, Laura was in the city center and fortunately she recovered in the open space of the main square with other people, where after a couple of hours she received help from the rescuers. Since the disaster happened, Laura has no news from her sister Silvia who at the time of the earthquake was at work in the next district. Laura is really worried, she hopes that nothing bad could have happened and would like to get in contact with her as soon as possible. The Messanger Dogs can help Laura to send her message and spread it among the displaced persons in the city and the camps, hopefully reaching Silvia.

The Messanger Dogs wear a particular uniform to identify them and a collar with a device that can record video and audio messages, and tags messages with the geolocation and time when the message was taken. The Messanger Dogs are spread around the catastrophe area both to collect messages from persons met casually along the way and to let them browse the messages for a message addressed to them. At the end of the day, the Messanger Dogs come back to their assigned camp, where all the video and audio messages are downloaded to a device accessible to all the people in that area. Volunteers carrying materials from one camp to another will also carry and spread the messages among the camps, so that a bigger number of people could get to see those messages. When Laura sees the Messanger Dog in her camp, she decides to leave a message for Silvia, saying that she is alive and safe in the camp. When the messages get to the main camp in the district where Silvia is located, she will get to see the message from Laura.

Defining the concept

Sketching the messenger dog uniform

Dog uniform pattern cutting

Thanks to Matt Cottam for the pics.

Scriba. My first project of GUI

What’s a GUI?

I have started to understand what this word means at the beginning of january, for the course of Graphical User Interface.

The first 10 days of the course was held by Frank and Timm from Germany and I was in group with Ishac and Pedro. We decided to develop a concept of GUI for a personal letter writing software.

At first, we started our analysis with a big brainstorm about what makes the experience of writing a letter so personal, when done on traditional media such as paper. It is not only the writer and the content shaping the letter, but also the sorrounding (sounds, physical location) and time. Writing a letter is a ritual where you have to go through different fixed steps and the freedom or choices you take inside those steps make the outcome really personal.

We tried to translate the experience of the ritual to the digital letter in Scriba.

When you write a letter, what makes it personal is not only the content you transfer with words, but also the way you go through the different steps to build it. It is a process that allows to capture beyond the media you are writing on, thanks to the influences that the environment around you and the time impress on the content and your physical outcome.

Scriba aims to make the user experiencing the same process while writing a personal letter on the computer. On one hand, Scriba allows you to focus on your letter by isolating you from your computer environment. On the other hand, it gives space to temporal traces by a navigation bar that counts your writing sessions as dots and by leaving empty spaces as time passed by between them.

Scriba records the environment around you by analyzing the light and the noise. If it recognizes you are writing in a place that doesn’t help focusing, the lines will start to become irregular and bend.

Writing a letter implies reducing distraction and dedicating time to the person you are writing to. This is why even leaving traces of your errors could be precious for building the message of your letter.

VIDEO_SCRIBA : http://vimeo.com/8713728

Working with Pedro and Ishac was really a nice and rich experience. I had with them a very deep hands on learning of Illustrator and Flash!

Thanks to Pedro for sharing the pics.

HBP_Human Bee Pollinator

The HBP corp has its uniform now. Me and Jacek finished it before Xmas and presented it in Copenhagen during COP15 at the KlimaForum during Ciid Guerilla Intervention.

For that event we had to make a poster as well.

To make a little summary of the project, here you find a little description of scenario and final wearable outcome.

“Beecoming is a project that focuses on the problem of bees colony collapse disorder. Nowadays bees are dying due to neonecodine based pesticides used in agriculture, pollution and climate change . In 10 years it is estimated that bees might be extinguished on our planet. We may not be aware of it, but bee pollination is one of the main stone of the ecosystem we live in and our food supplying. 1/3 of our food depends on bees impollination: when bees get from a flower to another one in order to extract nectar (the bee food), they actually pollinate that flower that will finally turn into a fruit or vegetable of other kinds,  forage for animals included.

We decided to work on this future scenario when we could run out of the bees and people will have to turn into “human bees” to collect pollen and spread it among flowers. People could become new “bee” workers and also exchange pollen between themselves to improve the genetic exchange that  former bees used to do before naturally.

Beecoming consists of the uniform for the HBP corps _the future human bee pollinators.

It consists of a dungarees with HSP tag identification and a working apron with 3 different pockets where pollen brushes are placed. The human bee pollinators will take out the brushes to collect pollen from the flowers and store it in the pocket.

To pollinate another plant with a pollen previously collected, the human bee pollinator will extract a brush and swap it on the new flower.

Thanks to the the “wrist component” of the uniform containing an RFID reader, the human bee pollinator could match the best pollen for each plant by scanning first the plant and then the pollen pocket. A green or red light will appear on the wrist component display to communicates which pollen is better to use in each case.”

Thes were 3 samples of trees/flowers pollen that we carried to the Guerrilla Intervantion to simulate trees and plants the HSP worker could find in the field.

This is how the HSP worker scan trees/plants in the field and pollen in the pocket to see which one matches with the plant.

We used RFID tag both in the pocket and in the little trees/plants simulation bags.

Finally me as the first female HSP

The making of the human bee uniform

BEEcoming in progress 2

We tried to laser cut the fake white laser with double side tape glued on it to make the semisphere pattern slices . You get the brown edges due to the laser. So we decided to cut it by hand. Mayo, our colleague and friend from UK in CIID, suggested us to laser cut the tool to cut the slices and then use a scalpel to properly cut them out of the material. 

Then we put this haberdashery fake leather string to finish better the edge.

The handle sits on a kind of button we made from cardboard, wadding and fake leather. Glued with epoxy, just to make it strong.

Around the semisphere we put wadding , to make the object look soft.

On top of the wadding, the real material we want to use, a kind of wool/felt.

Jaceck is taking the job seriously here.

Eventually we made 3 objects and we also laser cut the more outside ring. The work is not complete, but we want to give time to the epoxy to cure good. Fingers crossed!

BEEcoming in progress

The pollen tool brushes are the first thing we are making. We need to make both the body of them and the cones. Here you find our process.

*Pattern cutting around a semisphere (hacked from a cheap world globe)

*Acrylic ring incorporated in the body thanks to the laser cutter

* Samples of cones and self-acquisition of Know How to Build a Foam Cone

Materials hunting during COP15

Me and Jaceck are working on the BEEcoming uniform and we are looking for lots of materials. The uniform will have tools to take pollen from flowers and we decided to make them like big brushes- califlower shaped- that have furry cones instead of hair. The idea is that you could get inside the flower and swap the cones on the inside of it to get the pollen. Maybe we will also have a hat like that, to take pollen from trees…

To make the cones, we were looking for foam an we got to this wood and insulation material shops in the heart of Copenhagen, near the school. It is quite a fascinating shop. It is full of little wood buildings where they store materials. You need to visit/explore them to look for the things you want. Look here to see where we got our foam…

While we were hunting for materials, remember that in Copenhagen the COP15 was just starting. Fortuantelly we were around the city biking and we got to see it on the spot and on the time it was happening.

BEEcoming!

The Wearable Computing 2 weeks project sees me in team with a great friend of mine in CIID, Jacek. He is a software developer from Poland, really friendly and he always wants to challenge himself with a smile on his face. For this he gets an extra point from me!

We brainstormed about Climate Change and came across the problem of failed pollination and the bees dying nowadays because of pesticides used in agricolture (neonecotide is the name of the one that kills the bee), season changing, flower blossom not regularly, pollution.

In USA the 80% of bees has dead and in Europe 40%. It is really a big problem because even if we don’t realize it, (and it is crazy we do not know this stuff…that we are not aware of such an important thing), 1/3 of our food depends on bees impollination: bees getting from a flower to another one pollinating that flower that will finally turn into a fruit, vegetable of other kinds, forage for animals.

Have a look here to see the hugeness of the problem:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Bees/bees3.php

http://honeybeenet.gsfc.nasa.gov/

http://www.celsias.com/article/potential-impact-colony-collapse-disorder-excerpt/

http://robobees.seas.harvard.edu/

http://www.fao.org/DOCREP/005/Y4586E/y4586e11.htm

We decided to work on this scenario…imaging that in the next future we could run out of the bees and people will have to turn into “human bees” to collect pollen and spread among flowers. People could become new “bee” workers and also exchage pollen between themselves to improve the genetic exchange that  former bees used to do before naturally.

Our first design “sketching on the body”, as Di teached us, is about a skin module that mimics the basket posterior leg of the bee, a body part in bees where they collect pollen in great quantity. It’s kind of spoon shaped leg with fur.

Anyway, bees get quite dirty of pollen because they are furry all around the body. They go to the flower to take food, the nectar, but they also take pollen and spread it around incidentally (that is obviously the plan of Nature) pollinating the environment around.

BEECOMING is the name of our project. Here some pics of our first sketch on the body.

Wearable Computing in Climate Change

After the users research exausting weeks, we are having an intensive and fun session of wearable computing with David Gautier, Di Mainstone and Prya. By chance, recently I was looking at the work that Di made at V2 in Rotterdam and surprise…I realize I had her as mentor when she was her work and I recognized it.

The topic of the course is Performative Design and it is about wearable that can enhance human beings in performing other behaviors or actions…in the context of COP15. Such as saying, envisioning Climate Change Scenarios, future human evolutions, ect.

With Prya we also did an interesting exercise about designing with a material (taking from rubbish, yeah) to make a linear surface that has a structure and that performs differently from the way that material usually is used to. Like structuring it to give it new properties and characteristics.

I got a foam sponge and a metallic sponge, like the one for washing dishes. I had to change the feeling of touching the 2 kinds of sponge in order that using a little bit of metallic could still give me the feeling of the foam one and viceversa. I made a honeycomb filled structure, so that you can touch the bigger surface to feel the metallic sponge and the lower one to feel the foam sponge…

Di instead teached us how to cut patterns around the sphere from textile. She said that once we learn how to do it around the sphere, then we can do it wherever we want! Yuppie! It was really a crazy and useful exercize. I think I will use this technique a lot in the future!

The Transparent ER

This is the outcome of our user research at the ER. We called it the Transparent ER.

Main screen in the waiting room of the Transparent ER deparment

Map screen from the Emergency Room website

Here you find our documentation of the project, from the user research up to the concept development.

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We developed a national online service designed to alleviate and disperse patient pressure on the regional E.Rs. By providing a simple overview of the state of each ER in the region, we enable walk-in patients to make smart decisions from home as to where they will be treated fastest and where they will burden the system the least, freeing up resources for the ones who need it the most.

At the same time, we expanded this online service into the ER´s themselves – providing real-time visual information in the waiting room as to the state of the ER; how many patients are being treated and what is their status: is it life or death? or is it simply a fractured ankle? Allowing waiting patients increased transparency as to why they are waiting would generate respect and understanding for the extremely important work of the staff and cut down on frustration for both staff and patients alike.

The Context
Hillerød Emergency Room is an extremely hectic and busy environment. Patients arrive with little to no warning, life and death decisions have to be made in the blink of an eye and space and resources are limited. Experiencing the ER exposes people in their most vulnerable state – frightened and confused. It also demostrates highly professional medical staff who balance the systemic challenges of securing an efficient flow of patients with the very human and emotional task of caring in situations where people need it the most.

Realising quickly that many of the routines are too sensitive and crucial to handle without extensive medical knowledge, we quickly decided to concentrate on some of the more soft factors, that although less direct, could still make a major difference in the day-to-day running of the ER. Focusing on the patient experience, we quickly began to see a pattern emerging, revealing a deeper schism between delivering efficient medical care and ensuring the most pleasant patient experience possible under the circumstances. This moved us towards several different directions, focusing on the issues of: patient identity; security; and information vs. frustration and emotion.

Gathering User Insight
To gain an initial understanding of the dynamics of the ER, we employed several different approaches. We shadowed different nurses at work, observing their routines and day-to-day tasks. We spent hours in the waiting room emulating patients and we interviewed a number of different doctors, nurses and patients.

These interviews took place partly as co-creation sessions where we employed different design games and scenarios to prompt interviewees to break out of their usual routines and perspectives. We asked the nurses to put themselves into the patients shoes, and describe what they thought was going on from the patients perspective through each stage of the journey through the ER, using pictures and key emotions. We checked this against patient interviews, looking for discrepancies and differing understandings.

We employed a more phenomenological approach, asking patients to dress dolls in layers of emotions – represented by actual doll dresses – ranking emotions and needs such as security, attention and information from the most important to the least. Also we used category shifts, asking the doctors and nurses to imagine the ER as a restaurant, and hence trying to concentrate on the service aspects of the experience.

These games and interviews provided us with following key insights: The relationship between patients and nurses is instrumental to the patient experience, but can be difficult to maintain throughout; There is a built in schism between focusing on the individual needs of the patient and the collective needs of the patient body as a whole; Many patients arrive with maladies treatable by their own GP´s – often because of lack of knowledge about their own condition and the function of the ER; and a vicious circle arises from patients being frustrated when not being informed, resulting in patients aggravating staff who then again have less mental resources to inform and care for patients.

Design Challenges
Based on our insights we developed 3 design challenges that framed our solution. We asked:

How can we increase transparency and reveal the inner workings of the ER, promoting increased empathy patient-to-patient and patient-to-staff?

How can we increase the flow of relevant information between staff and patients, creating more profitable relationships between them?

How can we decrease pressure, by limiting the expenditure of resources on patients who could be treated outside the ER?

Exploring the User Experience
We tested our online service and display prototype with nurses and doctors during our last co-creation session, using mock-ups and scenarios. Most of them thought if could be a good solution, reducing tension and frustration for patients that wait a long time before being treated.

On the other side, some nurses voiced concerns about creating false expectations about the waiting time – pointing to cases where serious patients push back all others, creating long waits for less than life threatening maladies. Still others suggested incorporating more information on the routines and duties of the staff, hoping to create a more empathic attitude and deeper understanding of the hectic reality of the staff.

Finally, there are political concerns regarding the redistribution of patients to different ERs. There is talk of closing down some of the regional ER´s and creating a “super-hospital” in Hillerød. Something that would require completely new facilities for the ER.

Hence we decide to concentrate on creating non-specific and abstract visuals, with no concrete information (e.g. definite waiting times in minutes and hours), thus avoiding false expectations while still keeping the transparency aspects intact. Also we included more space for information of different kinds: “What to expect as a patient”, “what to remember as a patient”, “what happens behind the scenes” “ what is the triage system and how does it effect you” and also specific and topical information like treating flu epidemics and the like.

Finally it was presented to management, who clearly saw the value of our solution – even inviting us to continue to contribute with insights, especially if the reorganisation goes ahead.