Blog

The Talent Traffic: Infographic Revisited

When Fast Company‘s Co.Design featured an infographic that suggested Facebook was winning the talent war with new hires, Alumnus Gene Lu was skeptical. Inspired by a quote from Edward Tuft, “A graphic does not distort if the visual representation of the data is consistent with the numerical representation,” he took a closer look at the dataset, crunched them through Excel, and emerged with an updated version that seeks to tell a better story.

Gene Lu’s updated infographic on the talent traffic between Silicon Valley’s major startups.

Alumnus Colleen Miller Featured in HOW Magazine

Alumnus Colleen Miller is among six recent grads featured in the July issue of HOW Magazine. “Career: Next Generation of Designers” tracks fresh grads just starting their design careers and follow their job searches. In the article, Colleen talks about the exciting possibilities offered by interaction design, the work/life balance, and her ultimate goal to find “new ways to contribute delightful experience to the world.” The article also includes tips for new grads in their job search.

Purchase the magazine online or at your local bookstores.

Information Visualization

Information Visualization with Steve Duenes (Spring 2010) and Nicholas Felton (Spring 2011).

Students were asked to visualize a section within the permanent collection at MoMA or the Met. Or, they may visualize a single sporting event or season. Or, a personal collection of their choosing.

View this project

Now Online: OPEN IxD Thesis Presentations

Missed OPEN IxD, the MFA Interaction Design Festival? Watch videos of individual student presentations from the Class of 2011, opening remarks from Liz Danzico, and the closing keynote from Marc Rettig. Videos are also available for download from iTunes U to your iPhone and iPod touch.

In the Press: Nike+ Project Featured in Fast Company

Allison Shaw’s tongue-in-cheek infographic points out the errors and pitfalls within the Nike+ system, so that it can be improved in the future.

For their “Infographic of the Day,” Fast Company‘s Co.Design featured several students’ Information Visualization project. Inspired by Nike+ data from New Yorkers who track their exercise, students were asked to “find something compelling” by instructor Nicholas Felton. The result varies in size, color, function, and approach, but all seek to reveal habits, and in this case, an outline of Manhattan emerges.

Read More from Co.Design or View All Projects

Nike+ Visualizations

Information Visualization with Nicholas Felton.

Using data from Nike+ users in New York City who tracked their runs, students paint a portrait of runners and bicyclists on the move in NYC.

View this project

A Semester in Review: Prototyping User Experiences

Prototyping User Experiences with Robert Fabricant, Josh Musick, Clay Wiedemann, and Jeff Hoefs.

Students were asked to produce a video to reflect on the use of prototypes in the design process. They talk about the project they did during the class, challenges they faced, and share some valuable tips and techniques.

View this project

OPEN IxD: Thank You For Watching

Hundreds gathered on May 5 to celebrate the work from the inaugural class of MFA Interaction Design at the School of Visual Arts. Chair Liz Danzico, moderators Paul Pangaro and Jennifer Bove, and keynote speakers Scott McCloud and Marc Rettig bookended the day with insights, reflections and encouragement, and 17 students presented their stories and interactive work.

A warm thanks to all who came out or tuned in to the live webcast for the first ever MFA Interaction Design Festival. Watch videos of all 17 student presentations, or take a look at our flickr photostream and project summaries below for highlights from the day.

Class of 2011

Angela Huang | Hobnobber, a service for people suffering from social anxiety to practice social skills with face-to-face challenges.
Beatriz Vizcaino | Slow Eats, a tablet application that helps speed eaters slow down and savor food.
Carmen Dukes | Springboard a concept for a cooperative toy set that allows children the ability to create their own play environments.
Chia-Wei Liu | Secret Mission Me, a family-oriented activities app to foster better communication between children and their parents.
Clint Beharry | Orbit, an application for researchers to explore the universe of their data and discover new ideas.
Colleen Miller | Food for Thought, an app for improving personal eating habits by providing tips and a system for tracking nutrition changes.
Derek Chan | Superzeroes, a location-based mobile game that takes place in the real world.
Eric St. Onge | Obtract, a Mac app designed to track and reduce digital distraction for small teams of knowledge workers.
Evinn Quinn | Homebase, a social service that helps with finding the perfect room and roommate.
Gene Lu | Story Forest , an app that shares and replays your memories at locations where they were made within a city.
Jeff Kirsch | Bookish, an app for readers to capture a personal response to a book at a given time and place.
John Finley | Locus, a tool for facilitating the conversation between citizens and planners.
Katie Koch | Cultivate, a community for educators to engage in critical self-reflection and work together to improve teaching practices.
Kristin Graefe | Postgeist, a service that helps collect a digital legacy to pass on long-lasting memories to family and friends.
Michael Katayama | Seneca, a web service that helps transfer time spent online at home into time for real world activities.
Russ Maschmeyer | Motiv, an open source project that uses Kinect to give digital musicians direct control of emotional expression by interpreting their physical gestures in real-time.
Stephanie Aaron | Oasis of Healing, an online space to inspire and empower architects, hospital administrators, and clinicians to incorporate nature into their facilities.

Design Charette: Envisioning a New Space

What do you do with a book, a chair, a sharpie, craft paper, or masking tape？Design a future department space? You bet. Using one everyday item, students participated in a design charette to envision a new space for MFA Interaction Design. The goal of the workshop was to demonstrate function and purpose to those unfamiliar with the exhibited item, and as students considered functions of the small, larger reflections emerged.

Sketches and ideas from students will be incorporated in the final design of the new MFA Interaction Design studio, due to open this fall. Take a look at our Flickr photostream for work in progress.

Make a Tiny Change, Then Yell Victory!

Second-year student Stephanie Aaron attended the Healthcare Experience Design Conference in Boston on April 11. Her thesis, Oasis of Healing, seeks to improve the hospital patient experience through the use of nature.

I was surprised at how much of the conference focused on behavior change. Sure, topics ranging from high-tech solutions to electronic medical records and creating empathy were covered. But maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised — in a recent article in The New York Times, Mark Bittman said “For the first time in history, lifestyle diseases like diabetes, heart disease, some cancers and others kill more people than communicable ones.” This being the case, perhaps behavior change is our best bet to become a healthier society and lower our healthcare spending.

In the keynote, BJ Fogg, Director of the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, shared his secrets of behavior change and his behavior grid. His steps to a new habit are: make it tiny (like flossing only one tooth), find a fixed point in your day to do it (what comes before and after), train the cycle (rinse and repeat), and reward the behavior (shout victory)! He demonstrated this by handing out dental floss, handwritten post-it notes and had us all (optionally) floss one tooth in public. He pointed out that ability trumps motivation, you might be motivated to do something but if you have no idea how you will fail. When starting a project, don’t start with totally unmotivated people, start with motivated individuals (Facebook wasn’t initially aimed at grandparents).The behavior grid was the most useful takeaway of the conference. It explains and maps out the differences between creating new behaviors, doing familiar behaviors, and increasing, decreasing, or stoping behaviors. It also maps these across time. It’s an essential tool for anyone working on projects involving behavior change.

Other speakers showed how game mechanics can be used to engage users. In the words of Trapper Marklez of MeYou Health “You need to be better than Facebook – at least for five minutes.”

One of the most poignant presentations was by Lisa Nugent of Johnson & Johnson on how teenagers with chronic conditions are an underserved population. We don’t know how to engage with them on a level that is meaningful to them. The teens do not define themselves through their illness, they measure their quality of life through moods and friends.

Attending the conference was a great experience for me. If I had gone last year I think I might have done a completely different thesis based on the talks by BJ Fogg and Lisa Nugent. Nonetheless, I do plan on taking what I learned into my professional career.

– Stephanie Aaron, Class of 2011

Thesis Sneak Peak: MOTIV User Test

Russ Maschmeyer, who issued an open call for collaborators to help develop his thesis prototype, MOTIV, recently made a user test video where he put others in control. MOTIV is a new kind of live digital instrument, a new approach to computer music performance, that uses Kinect and human gesture to apply real-time expression to sequenced music.

Rotman Business Design Challenge: Help Me Help You

A group of students ventured out to Toronto for the Rotman Business Design Challenge on March 25-26. Below, first-year student Sarah Koo shares the team’s process from problem, ideation, to final concept.

Challenge

With healthcare selected as the problem space, we were asked to target a segment audience and identify a solution that the Mayo Clinic could implement. Competing against 11 Rotman teams, three MBA and a few other MFA teams, Rotman BDC was definitely a testing ground for the critical thinking skills and ideation approaches we’ve acquired during our time at SVA.

Approach

The case study was incrementally disseminated over the course of three weeks, with just ten minutes alloted for our pitch to a panel of judges. Having been exposed to the rhythm of rapid iterations and, of course, the ten minute pitch in our coursework at SVA, we ideated our way through. Our classmates probably wondered what had come over us as we took over the whiteboards to strategize our process, identify the core problem, gather insights, and organically explore possible solutions.

The team on stage at the Rotman challenge. From left to right: David Bellona, Carmen Dukes, Sarah Koo, Erin Moore, and Beatriz Vizcaino.

Solution

Our target? Hyper-connected users between the ages of 18 and 35 who use technology to maintain social networks and track lifestyle data, but are disconnected from health care professionals, medical records, or sufficient knowledge about preventative health measures. There was something about the dichotomy of the users’ social connectedness yet obvious disconnect with health that we wanted to address. Having found that our users like to rely on friends and family for advice and support, we felt that tapping into their existing habits and support networks would be a key way to motivate sustainable behavioral change.

And that brings us to “Help Me Help You.”

Help Me Help You is an online health and wellness community for young adults that offers discounts for collective participation in health challenges. With a unique combination of community support and monthly rewards, Help Me Help You encourages its members to be proactive about all aspects of their health on both mobile and web platforms.

Addendum

While we didn’t make it to the finals, our entire team agrees that this was a formative experience. It turns out that this competition was about more than just coming up with a winning solution. It was about learning how to work cohesively while balancing other obligations and time constraints, stand firmly behind our iterative approach and subsequent insights, and put our collective skill sets to the test. And as MFAs equally pitted with the MBAs, we were proud to realize that while our methods and values as designers may still be questioned at times, we can definitely compete on par.

–Sarah Koo, Class of 2012

A Day in the Life at SXSW Interactive

First-year student David Bellona shows us the crowds, the slides, the food, and the general onslaught of activity from a day in the life at SXSW.

I feel like I’m inside the Internet.

At SXSW Interactive, there are hundreds of distractions around every corner. “Hey! You heard about NewSocialSiteMashup.com? You can tweet or connect with us on Facebook. Scan the QR code for more info or take our coupon to the PepsiMax tent for a free download from Microsoft, sponsored by AOL. Just ride in a Chevy Volt on your way there.”

The above is echoed every ten-feet, begging for your attention as you concentrate on the next Foursqaure check-in, Twitter blast, or Hashable connection with your phone. It’s no wonder that alcohol flows freely at SXSW — you need a few drinks per day to handle the onslaught of marketing babel. This wasn’t the case inside the conference rooms. Once seated at any variety of panels, talks, or workshops, you only had to concentrate on one thing — the presentation. Attendees were encouraged to leave a talk if they found it uninteresting, conditioned from the speed of life outside. Some were great and some were ok, but with the exception of some, many failed to proclaim a new, prolific idea, seemingly afraid of a potential twitter backlash that would begin before the presenter had finished.

With little time for vowels, startups, entrepreneurs, attendees, and presenters connected with one another at a variety of networking parties. Attempting to navigate a packed lineup of events, one can feel an anxiety typically reserved for Internet surfing. By Monday, I learned to relax a bit, soak in what SXSW and Austin had to offer, and chose my events casually. Follow a typical day at SXSW here and on my flickr photostream:

Breakfast

On any given day, it was inevitable that I was stopped by someone selling a new web service or giving out SWAG. Luckily, I was able to snag a free breakfast taco on my way to the first talk of the day at the Hilton.

Austin Conference Center

The Austin Conference Center is where the majority of SXSW Interactive talks and panels happen. The video game Screenburn Expo as well as the SXSW Expo were also held here. I bumped into Christopher Fahey as I wandered around.

Half-Rack

This was my lunch. Half-rack of pork ribs, baked beans, potato salad, pickles, and white bread.

Solar Panel Recharging Station

Awesome. There were recharging stations almost everywhere, but this was the only one powered by the sun.

My 8mm camera

I checked one out. Kodak is going to send my footage in 1080i HD in a few weeks.

More photos on flickr

–David Bellona, Class of 2012

Anatomy of a SXSW Panel: Designing a Conversation

Second-year student Katie Koch go behind the scenes in a Q&A with SXSW Interactive panelists.

The past four days have been a dizzying experience of networking, learning, and eating (!), with hardly a moment to breathe and absorb it all. A ‘quick’ scan through the South by Southwest schedule proves to be an arduous task, with as many as twenty different activities happening at any given time. Designing one’s schedule is an activity in itself, an ongoing challenge to find a discussion that delivers the right mix of novelty, intrigue and productive banter.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending “My Prototype Beat Up Your Business Plan,” with Ade Olonoh (Formspring), Jeffrey Kalmikoff (SimpleGeo), Kendra Shimmell (Adaptive Path) and Kristian Andersen (Kristian Andersen + Associates).

I sat down with Jeffrey, Kristian, and Kendra after the session to get the story behind the panel. As a team they designed the framework for a conversation about the value of building and communicating an idea. They met a responsive audience whose questions ignited a greater conversation than the one they had intended.

Katie Koch: How did you guys come together as a panel?

Kristian Andersen: I submitted the panel idea, and as is often the case, I forgot about it. And five months later they send you a note with “Congratulations! ...Now you need to put your panel together and get back with us in two weeks.”

When I first submitted it my thinking was maybe this would be a solo presentation, but as soon as I began to think about the dynamics, I thought it would make a lot more sense to take the panel approach.

Katie: Was there an experience that inspired the idea for the panel?

Kristian: Personally, yes. [When I’m] wearing my investor hat, people ask a lot for advice on pitching tips, and “what should be in my deck?”, and increasingly I found myself saying “Hey, if you could come to the table with something that works that you can show us that will tell a story about your business, that is far more effective than five-year performance documents and executive summaries and…” That was the catalyst.

Katie: What conversations did you have with each other before the panel today?

Jeffrey Kalmikoff: We had a phone conversation two months ago. That was pretty much it. For about an hour.

Kendra Shimmell: During that conversation we shared our particular perspectives on business plans, how you get things off the ground, the role of “making” in all of that, and we started to identify where we had points of contention or agreement. [We knew that] everyone on the panel’s going to have a strong point of view. From the audience’s perspective, if one person takes that too far they’re going to lose the sense of communication and rhythm. It was very much orchestrated so that we would be sensitive to the experience the audience would have in watching the panel.

So we could make sure that the conversation was tighter bound, we also had discussions around how we were defining things: How do we define prototype? How do we define business plan? What conversation are we trying to have? What conversation are we not having? We planned the panel by basically prototyping the panel. We met and tried [the conversation] out to see how it might go.

Katie: Was there anything that was unexpected today? Anything that totally changed what you were planning for the conversation?

Kristian: No, it went pretty much as planned!

Jeffrey: But the thing is, we also had a lot of conversations about our experiences watching panels and what we don’t like about them. They either end up being really disorganized or they end up being people agreeing with each other for an hour. [We asked ourselves] what do we want people walking away knowing about each one of our points of view?

Katie: Each of you had a goal for what you wanted to communicate, and once you reached that goal you felt the conversation could go in any direction?

Kendra: Yes. And the audience questions made the conversation more interesting and took it in a new direction.

–Katie Koch, Class of 2011

Collaboration and Community: Hold On Loosely

From SXSW Interactive in Austin, second-year student Russ Maschmeyer tells a lie, then issues an open call.

Yesterday I had an epiphany, and it all started with a lie.

Saturday morning I attended what I thought was a SXSW presentation on community building. It turned out to be less of a presentation, more of a sharing and discussion group about the communities we were building. Uh oh. I suddenly realized there were forty eager over-sharers between me and the exit doors. It was too late. I hadn’t come prepared to talk about the community I was building. I wasn’t even building a community! So when it came time for me to share… I told a little lie.

“Well I’m a graduate student, building a new kind of expressive instrument, so I’m trying to build a community of musicians to play with it and help build it, together, into something really valuable.”

It was a little white lie—until I heard myself say it.

Then I realized how ridiculous it was that it wasn’t the truth. It immediately dawned on me how transformative turning full-force to a community could be. The idea is nothing revolutionary, but if you’re like me, it may be revelatory.

OpenFrameworks artist and developer Zach Lieberman talks consistently about DIWO, Do It With Others. It’s the central tenet behind the open source movement—not mention our democracy—but we often take those bodies (politic or otherwise) for granted. Of course you would need to get together with others to manage a country. Of course you would need to open source your code on a project that large. But here’s the kicker: those projects didn’t start out that large. They started as some person’s hobby, somebody’s pet project. You can’t build to that scale, or sustain it, without asking for some serious help.

Top to bottom: Jessi Arrington, Kevin Tamura, Jason Santa Maria, Russ Maschmeyer, Jennifer Brook, Matt Brown, Josh Stewart, Rob Weychert, credit Jessica Hische. Not pictured: you

I don’t know about you, but that makes me nervous. How do you steer your project when there are eight (or three thousand) chefs in the kitchen? Wanting to retain control over your pet project isn’t a selfish desire. You had an idea, and you believe in it enough to see it become real. So how do you hold on to the reigns?

I think the answer is surprisingly simple: be the person with the vision. See a future, a world in which your thing—whatever it is—exists and affects the lives of real people, and then start telling others about it. Put that vision out there in the world. Keep putting it out there in the world. The people who get a contact high off of it are the people you want to work with. The community you build could be the people you’re building for. It could be people who share your skills or people who have complementary skills. What they’ll all be looking for is vision. If you give a damn about what you’re making, you’ve got to be the person supplying it.

Community is about collaboration, not control. If you enjoy being a directorial tyrant, turn back. Come no further. You need to have a vision, but you also need to be ready to be wrong. Get flexible. In the immortal words of .38 Special, “Hold on loosely, but don’t let go.”

As creative people we’re constantly taking part in or reaping the benefits of creative community. It’s time to stop keeping out cards so close to our vest. It’s time we opened ourself up to the community.

Say it out loud with me (no, really!):

“I’ve been playing around with this idea about __________, so I’m trying to build a community of ___________ to play with it and help build it into something valuable.”

Doesn’t that sound exciting?

Yesterday I issued an open call on meetup.com to musicians and developers alike. I want to build a community to play, and develop my thesis prototype, MOTIV, into an intuitive, powerful, and expressive musical tool. If you’re interested. Let’s collaborate!

Join the meet-up group:
Motiv Musicians & Developers MEETUP.COM Page

Share it on Twitter by using this link:
http://www.meetup.com/motiv-music/

–Russ Maschmeyer Class of 2011

Students

The Talent Traffic: Infographic Revisited

Alumnus Colleen Miller Featured in HOW Magazine

Information Visualization

Now Online: OPEN IxD Thesis Presentations

In the Press: Nike+ Project Featured in Fast Company

Nike+ Visualizations

A Semester in Review: Prototyping User Experiences