With the goal of using interaction design to improve people’s decision making in disaster situations, designers Amelia Koster, Brittany Williams and I created a library of disaster design principles.
Municipalities are usually in charge of putting together preparation programs and responding when events arise. However, not all municipalities have the resources or designers on their teams to bring forward user research or behavioral economics. Disasterdesignprinciples.com acts as a starting point or as a user-centered checklist for municipalities and teams working on their own people facing systems.
It’s been presented to the British Columbia government and is moving towards becoming an…
An act of care by Augusta Lutynski, Shamara Leonard, Mitra Mahmoodi, and Catherine Legros, Emily Carr University students.
After studying and exploring the connections between colonialism, racism, and culture through food this semester, it was time to find our own way to change the narrative through food.
“Food is a necessity, a communication tool, and a relational object” (Amanda Huynh, Race & Food, Emily Carr University)
Based on this premise, we designed an experience that leverages the space that food offers and aims to create meaningful conversations around food, identity, and heritage. Too often, the lack of mindfulness in the…
In the context of a university Design Research and Methods class we learned co-creation and several research methodologies. The class revolved around environmental health and measuring the impacts of an environment’s influence on people’s behaviours. With a multi-disciplinary team (Industrial designers Cora Hall, Benjamin Mills, Gian Fernandes and Communication designer Marcos Lopes), I designed cultural probe kits to learn more about food habits and philosophies of 20–30 year old Vancouverites.
What are cultural probes? Cultural probes are a qualitative research tool, where open ended activities are given to a group of participants to learn more about their daily lives and…
When cancer patients complete their treatments, they often feel a gap in care as their next appointment will only be 3 months later. Throughout the semester, I worked on an interaction design project attempting to fill in this gap in care for cancer survivors. This article is specifically about how motion in the UI helped us reach our design goals and how we displayed the product using AfterEffects to create an intro video, seen above.
We worked closely with CancerBC and HealthlinkBC to research the problem space and the video is a proposal intended for them.
A section about…
What started as a university project for ESL (English as a Second Language) students brought me to a larger design opportunity: Re-designing transcriptions. I recognized real-time transcription AI-software, like Google’s Cloud Speech API, are more accurate and cheaper than ever and the textual support provided by transcriptions can be an answer to several issues of accessibility and efficiency.
I created some design guidelines for designing transcriptions, through a live transcription mobile app. I imagined this product in the context of lecture halls and conferences.
I started with the following high level design principles based on the context and the users…
This piece was originally written for my classmates at Emily Carr University.
Here we are, 3rd year Interaction Design. This means you’re more than halfway through your degree. It also means this summer is most likely your last chance to get an internship at a (big) tech company.
This is an adaptation of a talk I gave at the Montreal Dribbble Meetup a year ago.
September 2014
My friend Tim and I left Montréal, our hometown, for an undetermined amount of time. Destination: Asia. More specifically, Bali, as we had heard it attracted digital nomads from around the world. After running a business together for the past year, I convinced Tim to drop out of business school that fall, before even starting. …
I worked on Cover Design History during the CODEX Hackathon (books and publishing hackathon) while at the M.I.T. Media Lab in Cambridge.
My small team consisted of university professors, one publisher, and front and back-end developers. As the only designer in my team, I had to create a brand identity and product design in less than 24h for our concept. Very little sleep happened that weekend!
I redesigned the Yelp user profile in 4 days as a challenge. No user or market research was performed for this project, I was instead encouraged to go with smart assumptions. I documented every step of this project below, from goal to final solution.
Optimize user profiles to promote social behaviour between existing users and increase user sign ups.
In order to create a solution that would work for every Yelp user, near-empty profiles of new users and review-packed profiles of elite Yelpers were analysed.
Designer @Microsoft, previously @Google, @YouTube, and @EmilyCarrU www.catherinelegros.com