Sprint 7: The Big Apple and beyond
‘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.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
First, updates from the Spring 🎉 🤖
The spring presentation went really well. The flow and areas of focus changed a lot after our meta-presentation. We made the transition between chunks of research and design more cohesive and outlined the parts of the entire presentation better to situate our audience in the storyline.
We weaved in demonstrations using our prototypes as well as real life references that proved to be funny and kept our audience engaged throughout! The questions ranged from positive comments on our prototypes and concerns about how focusing on technology’s capabilities would overshadow the need of supporting human to human connection.
Another presentation at NYC🗽
Summer started with our team flying out to New York City! We had been asked to present to the top executives of InterDigital with the aim of discussing today’s user-centric problems and possible new directions InterDigital could take. We spun out a different version of our spring presentation to suit the needs and experiences of our audience of executives.
The goal was to envision a future in which higher performing networks are used to return users to a primary position by capturing lost context in (increasingly) intelligent environments.
We organized three sessions, each session consisting of a short presentation and a few activities to connect them better to the topic. In the first session, we dived into the history of telephones. The objective was to gain insights from the past and understand how people have led revolution. In the second session, we focussed on the present. We explored what people value in communication today, how technology supports these needs, and limitations of current communication devices. The final session was about possible futures. We discussed potential solutions to the problems and examined how other competitors were addressing these challenges.
All the executives at InterDigital were very interested in the results of our research as well as the prototypes we showed. They discussed future possibilities and impact readily. It was a rewarding experience to present to experts from various fields in that room!
Plans for the Summer ☀️
Keeping in line with all the questions we got at the spring presentation and the one in New York, we
(1) have been diving into defining the context and
(2) translating the findings into actual prototypes, and
(3) considering natural interaction
that we’ve found through user testing during the previous semester.
Storyboarding by expanding context ↔️ ↕️
Our first round of prototypes with the idea of expanded contexts has led to us to lengthening the scenario we developed for our spring presentation. That had been a multitasking scenario in which the user joined a video call while cooking. Now, we are looking at a timeline that incorporates actions before and after cooking, being indoors and outdoors, possibly interacting with external systems in shops etc., and group communication. We’ll show you our prototypes and test results next time!
*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.
