February 2011
2 posts
3 tags
Kickstarter School
This week we were graciously invited the to first session of Kickstarter School, for SVA students interested in launching Kickstarter projects. The seminar offered insight into planning a project, structuring rewards, spreading the word, and much more. Since I’m considering ways to secure funding for the future production of my Thesis mobile app, I thought this would be a good way to learn...
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Goals and Requirements
The requirements presentation by Eric St. Onge last week helped me break my thesis thinking slump and take the idea of my project, Food for Thought, from a narrow, simple functionality and expanded the scope of the project in order to consider better ways to encourage behavior change. I may very well end up back in the same place, but before that happens I wanted to be sure to think about a...
January 2011
1 post
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For Everyone, the Essence in the Elevator
Essence: Food for Thought is a mobile application that addresses the widespread misunderstandings of food consumption by providing healthy recommendations and a system for tracking nutrition changes that can consciously effect improvements in personal diet regimens.
Benefits: By adopting healthy choices into your lifestyle, problems such as obesity, poor diet, inactivity, and a host of other...
December 2010
3 posts
4 tags
Reflection on Semester's Work
As the semester comes to a close and I reflect on the ideas presented and work completed since September, I am proud to be working on a project that still means a great deal to me. I look back at the “Five Things I hoped to Learn by Doing a Thesis Project” post from the beginning of the semester, and the goals I had going into this project continue to act as strong guiding ...
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Taking the App idea to the next level
A few requirements in the past week (a scholarship application and a Management class assignment) have asked me to clarify ideas about my thesis project. While I was feeling torn between two concepts, I decided to let one of them—the idea for a mobile app to assist in redefining food habits—emerge for the purposes of completing these assignments. This proved to be a most helpful exercise in...
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Reflection on viability & ideation work
“The purpose of brainstorming is not to find the one perfect design for your project. That will come later. Instead, the reason to ideate is to generate many concepts as rapidly as possible. At this point in the design process, quantity — not quality — is what matters the most. You want a wide variety of concepts that approach the project from a wide variety of angles. Even ideas...
November 2010
7 posts
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Prototyping
For my first prototype, I wanted to test the way a modified grocery receipt could affect the purchaser. I’m aiming this one at the “food gatekeepers,” the person in the family who takes responsibility for the food planning, purchasing and preparation in the home. By reaching out to my momma friends on Facebook, I secured a few weekly grocery receipts and started chopping. A...
First Round Sketches
My first round of sketches aimed at looking at all of the places where a family might interact with food—at home, in school, while playing, online, at restaurants—and the brainstorming stemmed from these locations. How can I address and create a concerted attempt to create more pointed and sophisticated approach to changing how Americans think and feel about food? According to Judith Warner...
Have to Believes
We’ve learned that part of developing a design strategy can include creating a list of “have to believes” that help shape your point of view. My thesis advisor Ian asked me to put together my list of “have to believes,” because they can help helps spark your vision, and fuel your choices.
A “have to belief” is a belief, not a fact, and promotes...
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Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think
I recently finished a fantastic book about the psychology of eating that was a treasure trove of advice for my thesis development, as I embark on a project that seeks to inform and change behavior about food consumption. Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, by Brian Wansink, Ph.D. embraces a way of thinking about food that aims to help people be aware the influences that can cause...
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Time for Personas
I’ve been a little tough on personas. I haven’t been convinced that they are useful, and have previously thought of them more or less as a fluffy deliverable for clients with big budgets and design teams with too much time on their hands. But the more I learn about how to create personas based on research while focusing on the behaviors, motivations, and expectations of the...
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Crunchier than Chips, Orange-ier Than Cheese Puffs
Why hasn’t anyone sent me this website yet? A bunch of Carrot Growers have put together this campaign for baby carrots, with the tagline, “Eat ‘em Like Junk Food,” Complete with silly chip-like packaging.
I don’t know if it’ll convince the kids to prefer them over junkier alternatives, but I like the thinking and suggest you follow @babycarrots on Twitter.
...
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The Plot Thesis Workshop
On Friday, 11/5, we spent the day in a workshop with with Gill Wildman and Nick Durrant, Nierenberg Chairs at Carnegie Mellon, thinking about how our thesis topic fits into the the future of our personal lives and the world around us. A number of questions aimed at further shaping our thesis ideas emerged. As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up? Easy! Little me thought it would...
October 2010
5 posts
Goals and Pitfalls
To begin synthesizing my research and interviews, I wanted to visualize the goals of fighting obesity by eating right & exercising, while showing the problems and pitfalls of achieving these goals based on the interviews I’ve had with mothers of small children. This week I’ll focus on the eating right aspect of health (physical fitness to be addressed at a later time). By...
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"Much to learn, you still have." ―Yoda
Exciting news! IAN SPALTER from R/GA has agreed to be my thesis advisor. He’s awesome.
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Inside the Mommy Brigade
Interviewing parents of small children has been an eye-opening study for me, and I look forward to continue shadowing families as I continue my project. I’m hoping to gain a better understanding of the pain points of good nutrition from families, who are dealing with health barriers on many levels. They face unhealthy cafeterias in their kids schools, they are working moms who have to...
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Food Matters
This week as part of my thesis research I read Food Matters by Mark Bittman. It was a great read, but most importantly there were points throughout the book where I saw calls to action that relate to what I’m looking to define as my final project. Here’s one:
“It would be unprofitable—for Big Food at least—if we moved our eating habits in the right direction. But not only...
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Food/Fitness Experiences
One of the biggest problems I’m having with my thesis research is trying to determine the “experience” I intend and the form it might take. This week, I’m sketching out some possible experiences to find something that resonates for me as a potential form for my project.
A system that uses the items you shop for (via supermarket club cards) to review your purchases and...
September 2010
6 posts
4 tags
Narrowing the Problems and the Solutions
Obesity is a symptom of a larger cultural problem.
The common sense approach here is to focus on food sources and physical fitness. The obesity issue is an easy fix: eat right and be active. Right? The problem is that it’s not that easy… To help focus my thinking, these are what I see as the cultural problems we are facing along with the solutions I can explore with my...
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“In order to whittle U.S. obesity rates down to 15 percent, the average American...”
– Reuters.com
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Five Things I hope to Learn by Doing a Thesis...
Confidence. Through this project I want to focus on the strength that is required to believe in my own ideas. So many ideas get lost in the shuffle, shot down by one conversation or negative review, remain undeveloped because I think there must be something better out there already, or that someone more talented could do it better. I will stand up for myself and what I believe is good...
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Simple Solutions with Big Impact →
This news article explores a simple study… could dividing a grocery cart with a line increase the amounts of fruits & veggies people buy? A research team placed a yellow line across the width of shopping carts with a sign designating one side of the cart for fruits and vegetables and the other for everything else.
The results?
“We showed a 102 percent increase in people...
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Kids Design their Own Dinners
With the website Zis Boom Bah, kids work with their parents to design their own meals. They get to play with different dinner choices, and in order to achieve the highest score possible, they must create a balanced, nutritious meal. Stars are awarded by creating a plate with balanced meat, grains, and vegetables, and when you try to add a dessert before you have a 5-star meal, a dialog box...
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Design for Healthy Food Options on a Budget →
Via Design Ignites Change
Morgan Ashley Allen designed a solution aiming to change the way families on Supplemental Nutritional Assistance programs (SNAP) eat. She created a specially designed planning package to help families choose foods that are compatible with long term health goals. With a cookbook written to enable budgets (rather than demean them), menu planner and shopping lists,...
August 2010
3 posts
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1 million people hungry, 1 million people obese
Ellen Gustafson’s TED talk via CNN.com: “Solving the world’s hunger and obesity crises together” calls for thinking that addresses our current food system problems.
I have hope that if we take a 30-year view of the future, we can create a food system that addresses the needs and health of the planet and its growing population.
Maybe we need to rethink regional food...
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“One of the main contributors to early puberty is thought to be increasing body...”
– The Wall Street Journal
July 2010
5 posts
4 tags
Create an Infographic about Childhood Obesity →
GOOD highlights submissions from their latest infographic contest: create an infographic about childhood obesity. Many may not be Tufte-friendly, but they do get right to the heart of Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! Initiative to “Raise a Healthier Generation of Kids.” This is a positive step in the involvement of design to raise awareness and offer new ways of thinking to...
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Kinda obvious, but..." Kids who eat with mom and... →
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Agribusiness model vs. Ecological Model
In this Ted Talk, Chef Dan Barber tells a story about the systems of farming practice. He’s a great storyteller, but for the big questions, the last 4 minutes of the talk say it all.
“How can we create conditions that enable every community to feed itself?”…”Don’t look at the agribusiness model for the future. It’s high on capital, chemicals, and...
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The Unhealthy Truth
Working at Random House this summer has yielded some great perks, including bound galleys of great books available in stacks in the cafeteria. I’ve just finished reading The Unhealthy Truth: How Our Food is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About It by Robyn O’Brien, and it has been a huge eye-opener for me. A few months back while consulting a nutritionist for another project,...
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This is Where You're Fat →
If there’s one thing I learned in information visualization last semester it is to be cautious in studying how graphics are represented to make an editorial point. This map at GOOD.IS shows 5% increments from 0-30% obesity, and the rest of the country is mapped from 30-100% obese. It gets a little vague, however there is no denying that a large span of adults in our country, being over 30%...
May 2010
3 posts
2 tags
Recipes + Illos + Blogs, Oh My
I love a blog that combines so many of my favorite things together, despite adding more time to my daily internetting. They Draw and Cook invites artists to contribute original recipe designs and illustrations, a great resource for me to find food based-illustrators for future projects.
Here are a few of my favorites so far:
Applecake by James Gulliver Hancock
Chef Kitty’s Top Secret...
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The issue with childhood obesity is not children,...
This article in the Huffington Post (It’s Time for Parents to Turn the Tide on Childhood Obesity) by David Kirchhoff, CEO of Weight Watchers, outlines the responsibility of parents and caregivers to create healthier environments for our children.
Five tools for success are suggested:
1. Focus food choices on nutritious foods.
2. Do not withhold treats.
3. Ration screen time.
4. Have at...
2 tags
Food Fight
There’s a great interview over at Design Mind that addresses many of the concerns I have about communicating the food issues I have been studying and struggling with. Sam Martin interviews Jonathan Safran Foer about his new book, Eating Animals, which discusses the food issues we are becoming more aware of and most importantly, the decision to care or not care when weighing the options of...
April 2010
6 posts
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Too fat to fight →
Many American children are so overweight from being fed french fries, pizza and other unhealthy foods at school lunchrooms that they cannot handle the physical rigors of being in the military, a group of retired officers say in a new report.
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Are we too busy to be healthy? →
Frog Design uses their people-centered design discipline to highlight some of the problems with finding the time to understand our health and prototypes some technology solutions for changing behavior.
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Why are we suffering an obesity epidemic? The... →
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King Corn: You Are What You Eat →
This film brings to light some of the challenges that I would like to face in my thesis development, namely the cycle and influences that make eating right a little harder than we all may be aware. As food becomes cheaper we are only beginning to understand the true cost that cheapness demands from our environment and our health. We are living in a world where “Animal nutritionists confirm...
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Looking towards May 2011: Thesis Presentation
In the margins of a Levenger notebook I have been re-stuffing with pages for years, lies the seeds of an idea that I will develop into a thesis project in my MFA Interaction Design program. Some interests of mine keep coming up, and because our first ideas are often some of the best ideas, it is likely that one of these tiny, tiny seeds will develop into a project that holds my passion and...
December 2009
2 posts
2 tags
MindFULL: Physical Computing Final Project
Physical Computing Final Project
by group members Stephanie Aaron, Gene Lu, Colleen Miller & Beatriz Vizcaino
You can find additional documentation for this project in these locations:
History, Story and Iterations: See below
code and electronics details at Gene Lu’s Blog
form details
slide presentation
What is MindFull?
A fork rest that reminds you to put your fork down and...
2 tags
Wireless Lab
Intro to the XBee Breakout Board
Since the XBee radio does not fit directly into our standard breadboards, we used a “breakout board” to connect the XBee to our system. Our soldering expertise came to play in this final lab as we had many tiny pins and sockets to carefully connect.
Connecting to Arduino
We connect the XBee (with breakout board) to the center of the breadboad,...
November 2009
3 posts
Motor Lab
Serial Lab
After hooking up a potentiometer to my Arduino board, and uploading this program, the serial monitor displays a bunch of seemingly random characters scroll by in the serial monitor window. These are the ASCII values associated with the byte numbers being sent from the Arduino board.
When I turn the potentiometer very slowly, the monitor displayes the ASCII values slowly, starting with numerals,...
October 2009
3 posts
Processing Lab #2
Using the Processing programming language to program images, animation, and interactions.
Shape Buttons
Triangle and Rhombus.
Color Swatches
Choose your paintbrush color.
Create a Character
Because you never know when you’ll need an alien stuck to your mouse.
Simple Animation
Alien floating head.
Square Lights
Quadrants light up when the area is moused over.
Color Swapper
red,...
Physical Computing Lab-Analog Output
Servo and Sensor
Connecting a potentiometer or other analog sensor to the Arduino’s analog input pin 0, then connecting a servo motor to the Arduino’s digital pin 9.
The original code: mapped to the servo’s 180 degree range, but editing the map changes the range to another scale. original code: val = map(val, 0, 1023, 0, 179); // scale it to use it with the servo (value between 0 and 180)...
Fundamentals of Physical Computing: Processing Lab
View Processing code version of White Line Square IV by Josef Albers 1966
Crazy paintbrush
September 2009
5 posts
3 tags
Fundamentals of Physical Computing: Analog Input...
Potentiometer Input
The potentiometer’s middle wire connects to the ANALOG input pin #3 on the Arduino board. No need to add resistors, becaue the potentiometer itself acts like 2 resistors, in a self-contained voltage-divider circuit. When an LED is added with a 330 Ohm resistor, and the program is uploaded to the Arduino board, we can see the LED dim and brighten with a twist of the...