Sprint 5: Back To The Future
We are a student group from Carnegie Mellon University studying Human-Computer Interaction. We partnered with InterDigital to create future experiences that are powered by technologies developed with people in mind, and we bring the people’s perspective to the project.
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Last time, we spoke about how we were conducting a design workshop on communication and a LOT has happened since.
We synthesized all our findings so far, walked the wall (biggest one so far), worked on our spring semester’s narrative and are in the middle of prototyping some exciting concepts for the spring!
Ongoing Desk Research
But first, remember how we were researching what literature had to say about natural experiences and autonomy and their integration into future technologies? We looked into autonomy this time and got some insights along with key questions we had to keep in mind as we worked on our project.
Key Insights:
- With the emergence of “personalisation”, users are slowly losing their autonomy over their digital world.
- So far, technology has done a good job of broadening choices but not of assuring their authenticity.
- Settings don’t give a sense of autonomy when they are there. But when they are not there, users feel a loss of autonomy.
This begged the question of what things humans really wanted agency over in this ever changing world. It also pushed us to consider what were the ‘key decisions’ that were needed to be made by humans.
We spoke to a Futurist!
Our clients, Donald and Jeffrey, connected us to Matthew Griffin, a futurist and founder and CEO of the 311 Institute, a global Futures and Deep Futures consultancy working across the next 50 years.
We started by talking about what the future would look like that led us into topics like behavioral interfaces, adoption and scaling and how regulators were still catching up with the capabilities of current technologies.
What happens when the only thing you have access to is all the world’s knowledge and skills? How do you bring that to life?
He stressed that our imagination was our limit when thinking about the future.
Our Direction so far
Overall, after realizing that context changed based on a million factors ranging from physical to emotional aspects of a human, we now had a different question to tackle.
How might we expand the meaning of context and provide seamless transition between the digital & physical world to connect people?
Remember the human to human connection because we’ll round back to it later!
To answer this question, we conducted two large syntheses based on our work and what we were looking to understand.
We generated findings by categorizing post-its data points, built insights by asking why about the findings, found opportunities by understanding the context and now reached the ideation stage.
Our Findings
From these, we gathered the big insights and reasoned out when and why they were important.
Finally, we highlighted the opportunities that arose from these insights.
- To better control the way they present themselves to others.
- To make people share their physical & digital environment.
- To help people overcome the barriers in understanding others.
- To lower the cost of miscommunication.
- To align people’s understanding.
These opportunities revolved around understanding and so we mapped out all the reasons why it was difficult for people to understand each other. And from these, we picked the ones that we thought would benefit the most with the help of technology (and then the top ones based on what we related to the most!).
We first made storyboards of experiences in each of these areas.
Prototyping
And then we made more prototypes (no surprises there). We tested with users quickly and had internal reviews that again highlighted the importance of autonomy and socially natural interactions.
Through the prototypes, we realized a gigantic takeaway that led us to the conclusion for this semester along with a little inspiration from the release of the iPhone.
The biggest value of all the experiences we had designed was not that they by themselves provided anything to us, but that they could be accessed in one place. This was why people loved the iPhone. It was a single device that let people have multiple experiences.
Devices right now are all about how best to let people interact with technology. But we think human to human connections are the most important. That is why shared understanding is our focus and we think a device designed with this aim will facilitate the best relationships between people.
Our Next Prototype!
So, from today, we’ll create a new generation of smartphones. We will be working on the user experiences, but also on what the integration of all the needs of humans would look like in their physical environment.
Some immediate points to note are that this device would be hands-free and without a screen. We’ll expand on the new ways of input, going beyond touch or capturing movement through a mouse. Maybe context in terms of detecting people, their emotions and environment could be an input.
All of these points are related to how this new device will interact with users. This is because we believe this whole new interaction will expand our definition of experiences through technology. We also realized our umbrella insight was that devices today have some limitations in containing the future technologies. So we want to create a new device and interactions for it.
“People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”
— Alan Kay
Our mission is to connect people with this new device — having people engage with each other more instead of getting locked inside their devices.
Future Plans
How can we restore the human to human relationship rather than increasing disconnect between them? By allowing them to share experiences instead of interacting with technology alone and then separately sharing their experiences with others.
We’ll start with building the experience. Our design process will go in two directions. First, we will work on building the experience to learn what interactions should be considered. Leveraging the insights from those prototypes, we’ll start building prototypes for the hardware.
We are excited for the summer!
Meanwhile, we are working on a meta-presentation…
Our spring deliverables include a report, a website, the spring presentation etc. We also have a walkthrough with our faculty to show our presentation and get feedback. But before that, we had to create a presentation about our deliverables. Basically, a presentation about our presentation. So we watched Steve Jobs, Sundar Pichai and Wall-E.
(This is the closest we’ve gotten to really being meta so far and it only took six hours and left us excited and drained. Our big synthesis also made it pretty clear that creativity and synthesis takes a lot of time and energy.)
For this meta-presentation, we had to create a very very high level narrative of everything to date. Let’s see the jumps that cover our project so far.
Speculative User Experience -> Communication -> Shared experience ->
Big reveal! New Experiences and New Hardware
We spent a while deciding what we wanted to critique on. Ultimately, we chose to use our audience’s experiences to get ideas on how to include our big prototype in our final client presentation.
This is all very exciting and this energy is visible in our team everyday! We are having fun and hopefully will only learn more and have more fun through the summer too.
*The work and knowledge gained from this project are only intended to be applicable to the company and context involved and there is no suggestion or indication that it may be useful or applicable to others. This project was conducted for educational purposes and is not intended to contribute to generalizable knowledge.
