Each Friday studios has a different theme. You may join any studio that fits your schedule and has space. This is probably a good place to mention that a few ideas are extremely common year-after-year: coordinating lunch, finding parking, connecting with a study buddy, and splitting a bill with friends. Consider these topics taboo. While there are strong apps in each of these domains, treating these as taboo stretches your brain more.
Would Google Maps be as effective as it is today without the voice guiding us? How sure are you that a picture was clicked without the virtual shutter sound on your phone? Can you think of ways to enhance the feedback given to users using sound - what are some scenarios where this kind of auditory response would make an experience richer and more effective?
Taboo: avoid creating another screen reader app or a notification app, these are features in an app not an app by itself.
It’s a big data era now. There has been an explosion of people and organizations looking to do interesting things with their data. Information design is the practice of presenting information in a way that fosters efficient and effective understanding of it. It closely related to the field of data visualization that allows us to spot patterns, trends, and correlations that otherwise might go unnoticed in traditional reports, tables, or spreadsheets. Good information design is crucial for making insights and taking actions. In this studio, we’ll explore how to effectively present information to help people. Something you might consider to help you brainstorm:
Taboo: Step/Calorie/Sleep Trackings
With the help of digital devices, we have an unprecedented ability to track our behaviors, habits, and thoughts. But turning data about ourselves and our communities into valuable insights is still remarkably difficult. This studio will explore ways to support monitoring, reflection, and behavior change by collecting, consuming, and sharing personally relevant information. We will consider:
Check out www.personalinformatics.org and quantifiedself.com for more inspiration
Taboo: Calendar, Goal, Note apps
It may be easier to understand mindfulness by considering what happens when we are not mindful: inattention. During inattention, our minds are free from the pressuring tasks of discerning stimuli or interpreting new information, and instead our brains return to what is known as the Default Mode Network (DMN), a sort of default circuit that activates when we are passive, associated with daydreaming, reliving the past or absentmindedly ruminating. Mindfulness is the quality or state of being aware of something. Our human ability to be aware of our thoughts, our environment and ourselves is very powerful, and being taken advantage of by the over-stimulating world we live in. In this studio we will attempt to create interfaces that can help us cultivate mindfulness to improve our lives.
Taboo: meditation app (Headspace is great!), Scheduler apps
Unnecessary obstacles limit learning in cognitively-complex domains such as computer programming. With a lack of appropriate feedback mechanisms and interventions, learners can experience frustration and disengage from the learning experience. In order to prevent learners from abandoning their learning goals, we must devise new ways to either remove or diminish the impact of the frustrating obstacles that learners encounter. For example, blocks-based programming languages remove the possibility of getting frustrating syntax errors, making them a good choice for teaching learners basic programming concepts. This studio is not limited to learning academic topics, like programming. Think about other topics in any preferred domain (aviation, cooking, gaming, etc.) that have frustrating obstacles that impede learning and consider:
Taboos: QnA sites/apps (StackOverflow, Quora) and basic note managers (Evernote, Keep)
There’s never been a community as large as the Internet. Luckily, the field of social psychology has been established centuries ago and provides many studies that can help inform the design of new technologies. These studies investigate the behavior of individuals in social scenarios, such as this, this, or this -- there are numerous ways technology can influence people. Designing social experiences can be challenging, but also fun and rewarding!
Taboos: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Slack, Tinder, Douyin, Wikipedia, Yelp