Spring Presentation & Summer of Prototypes
We finished our first semester of MHCI capstone! We had the opportunity to present our progress to our client, peers, and community, and were excited about the results. It was an empowering experience to share our vision, and co-create next steps.
We structured our presentation around our key goals from each sprint: research, synthesis, and our prototype ecosystem. We found it particularly challenging, but rewarding, to convey what we meant by a solution ecosystem during our rehearsals. While many teams were able to focus on one design, we needed to express the value and flow of our multimodal, nonlinear approach to user journeys.
With the arrival of summer, we will continue this design process alongside an increased cadence of testing. We are also excited to be attending conferences and conducting site visits! If you see us at the Smart Manufacturing Experience convention next week, come say hi :)
Summer semester also brings the return of classes. We spent our first few sessions back reviewing our work from the spring, and challenging assumptions we made during finals week. It was critical to us to avoid design fixation and attachment to our original pitch, as our own understanding of the problem as grown with research and conversations with new stakeholders.
Through a synthesis of our new knowledge and pretotype data, we formed a minimum viable product for our next sprint. We think that by narrowing our ecosystem spread from five to three, we can observe the core ecosystem interaction of users benefiting from location and time independent resources.
For development purposes, we have a few early candidates. While we could use Figma and Wizard of Oz style experiences, we are interested in applying industry standard tools, receiving industry quality data, and minimizing the barrier for industry to integrate our work.
Digital Knowledge Assistant: We started with VoiceFlow over the spring for their support of context and dialog state. This helped us show a potential path for visitors to the RoboticsCareer.org website, a project of our client, to find training and employment opportunities in a streamlined way. We also explored showing participating companies through Leaflet and Kepler.gl to observe if the new visualizations and interactions increased engagement. However, this was inconclusive, and so for the sake of our MVP, we’ve pivoted to other features that may be more impactful for the time being. For example, with the release of GPT-4o, we can support multimodality, and more easily build for questions from our archetypes that we wouldn’t otherwise anticipate. We’re also interested in deploying Algolia for our client’s knowledge base to shorten the end-to-end process of project sites receiving references.
Hands-On Learning Experience: Carnegie Mellon University has been an incredible source of faculty and staff with resources. We are currently designing an educational experience around an arm design from Kinova. Our primary goal with this stage is to understand friction points with control mechanisms, and if our Digital Assistant could provide helpful feedback.
Portable Conversation Facilitator: While our other two MVP options have higher engineering fidelity, we wanted an analog option as well. This would allow for maximum staying power in breakrooms, pockets, and on manufacturing floors, where we hope our work organically inspires continued touch points back to our ecosystem this summer. Our card deck includes QR codes, NFC, and descriptions with each topic.
All in all, we’re looking forward to seeing our prototypes out in the wild and iterating on our findings!
Note: This project is not intended to contribute to generalizable knowledge and is not human subjects research.
