“Don’t worry, I know” said the computer you taught

Wow, these past two weeks have been challenging. How can someone ever feel comfortable designing a personal experience for anyone? The sheer amount of potential outcomes and variables in the data you must account for is staggering. My team has been working to add as many virtual stickies to our MURAL to account for what our system can learn from the data, people, and its environment to create the most complete experience. How have we been doing? We do not have and will never have enough data points to account for all the possibilities a cognitive system may encounter. What I am truly learning how to do during this design process is how to trust a computer, being completely aware of its shortcomings and still have faith it will make the right decision. Damn, being a parent of our fictional digital baby is exhausting.

Using the communication model to design our potential feature set has been crucial to discovering our own perception potholes. What I mean by that is how as a team we only bring a certain amount of perceptions to the table, we must remind ourselves that we are designing for a much larger audience. Every time I have gotten stuck trying to synthesize a feature I role play the situation as someone other than myself. A mother, nurse, child, bystander. Each time I find a new solution path, like tree branches each fork in the road is another branch growing outward on its own. This being my first time using the communication model I look forward to implementing this process again because I will have a foundation of data points for intent, raw data, user data, and understanding principals about the world I will be designing for.