Meet the Team

Julia Cambre is a senior majoring in Symbolic Systems
William Chidyausiku is a senior majoring in Computer Science
Kyle Dumovich is a senior majoring in Computer Science

Brainstorming

Julia’s Ideas:

  • Customers who send back food at restaurants
  • Customers who return clothing or whatever stuff they buy that they don’t like
  • Returning gifts
  • Gift-giving
  • Buying items in relatively empty stores with aggressive clerks
  • Setting up a wedding registry
  • Hiring people
  • Firing people
  • Deciding in a group where to go to out to eat
  • Inviting friends to go to an event
  • Broadcasting to friends about an item you’re trying to sell (Coachella tickets)
  • Getting estimates on how much a service (like fixing a broken toilet) is going to cost
  • Tech support over the phone
  • Realtors presenting open houses
  • Parents writing letters to their children when they’re born for them to open/have later in life
  • Couples who meet on online dating sites meeting for the first time in person
  • People trying to meet up in a busy place with someone they’ve only interacted with over email
  • Couples who get set up by their friends on a blind date
  • Fans trying to get autographs from a performer or presenter
  • People trying to talk with their mouths full
  • People trying to avoid solicitations from people on the street (panhandling, or canvasing: “Do you care about the environment?”)
  • Children who are too young to have cell phones or computers/social media communicating with their friends from school on the weekends, outside of class, over the summer
  • Parents of young children trying to set up playdates
  • People who make up excuses to decline RSVPs to events
  • People who make a phone call and are put on hold while waiting to speak to a representative
  • People who interact with strangers on planes
  • Trying to discreetly get the attention of someone else from across the room
  • Customers interacting with cashiers while placing an order
  • Customers interacting with cashiers while checkout out at a store
  • Strangers asking for directions
  • Students in a MOOC attempting to interact with the course staff (through discussion forums, or when selected for an “office hours” hangout)
  • Drunk people waiting in line
  • People talking during a movie (or a presentation or some other situation in which you’re supposed to be quiet)
  • Deaf and hearing individuals interacting without sign language
  • People “code-switching” languages in the middle of conversations
  • People holding conversations while working out together
  • People asking someone for a favor

William’s Ideas:

  • Info to all people who leave a building
  • Info to all people who enter a building
  • Info to specific people either arriving at or leaving a specific location
  • Info to people driving
  • Holding doors open
  • Holding elevator doors open
  • People in a convoy
  • People biking together
  • People eating together
  • People walking together
  • People playing a board game together
  • People playing a sports game together
  • People Working together
  • People planning an event
  • People planning to meet up
  • Couples activity
  • Awake/asleep status
  • Energy level
  • High fiving
  • Ordering fast-food
  • Making an important decision
  • Making a memory
  • Taking a picture
  • Running a farm
  • Running a company
  • Planting things
  • Taking care of a flowerbed
  • Taking care of a pet
  • Taking care of children
  • Taking care of shared tasks
  • Taking care of a relationship
  • Taking care of a group
  • Monitoring security activity
  • Ordering supplies
  • Monitoring money usage
  • Monitoring use of utilities
  • Moderating design activities
  • Locations within a specific building
  • Room use

Kyle’s Ideas:

  • dealing with the awkward “hey…” when texting someone you haven’t talked to in a while
  • keeping up with friends -- a friendslist manager
  • inviting people to a big event in a personalized way
  • asking a group a question or for a favor
  • food: share with friends or record for yourself how something smells or tastes
  • communication in a crowd (spotty cell service, no constant checking of your phone)
  • share your mood with friends with music or colors, statuses that reflect your current mood
  • fixing voicemail -- it sucks, though sometimes you want to call straight to it
  • being put on hold while on a phone call (with a friend? with tech support?)
  • interacting with strangers on a plane, meeting new people with your interests and sitting with them
  • local area networks via WiFi or bluetooth
  • sharing location information that syncs with gcal -- prevent phone calls/texts when you are busy in class or at a meeting, and notify those persons trying to reach you
  • prompt users on location change to record where they are and what they are doing to update this database
  • communication with your neighbors (interesting because everyone has a different/unique set of neighbors)
  • product feedback for companies / reviews standardized and reminders

Three Final Ideas

Following our brainstorming session, we looked for common themes and narrowed our list to three final project ideas.

Caring is Sharing

Target Users:  

People who have a long term care obligation as an individual or as part of a shared obligation. Concrete examples include pet owners who must take care of of their pets, plant enthusiasts who need to take care of their plants and cutodians who must maintain a building. The use cases become more aligned when individuals participating in long term care must rely on other individuals to step in for them when some other obligation arises.

Communication Need: 

Coordinating care can be a difficult and at times awkward problem. When several individuals have a shared responsibility, knowing who has done what (has anyone walked Scottie today? Has Dexter the goldfish been fed? Did anyone vacuum the first floor? etc.) involves asking each individual involved in the responsibly in order to inform one's own contribution if a contribution is indeed in order. Additionally, getting a holistic view of the status of the object of care can be difficult if not impossible, depending on the nature of the object of care and the nature of the care being provided. Furthermore, for individuals pursuing a long term care project alone, taking someone on board for any amount of time involves synthesizing some sort of procedure for the new helper to follow each time this becomes necessary, and if the new helper is not familiar with the appropriate care habbits there may be a disconnect between the instructions and the quality of care the helper is able to provide. Because many tasks must be repeated periodically, the problem becomes more of a downright annoyance than a slight inconvenince. This issue is structural in nature. How can we best keep track of who has done what, what needs to be done, and what the general state of affairs is in a long term care project in a way that is convenient and easily accessible for all involved?

Context: 

A specific long term care project, be it taking care of a pet, children, a family member, a building, etc. Since generic planners can be adapted to solve this sort of problem to a certain degree, the effectiveness of this idea lies in addressing a specific care project and effectively covering all aspects of that type of care project and producing nuanced metrics for establishing status and needs specific to the care project. Further ideation will establish exactly what the subject will be.

Meeting strangers on a plane

Target Users: 

Passengers traveling by airplane (though it could be applicable to other contexts like trains, buses, etc)

Communication Need: 

Airplane passengers often have different preferences in how they'd prefer to spend their time during a flight. While some opt to sleep, read, or work, others look to pass the time by interacting with the people seated next to them. Talkative passengers who'd like to engage in conversation and meet someone new on the flight need a way of being matched up with other individuals who are similarly interested in chatting.

Context: 

Pre-flight and/or in-flight, as a way of introducing passengers to one another and helping to support their conversation. The app could be used in conjunction with the airline's seating assignment mechanism to place compatible passengers together, or could be limited to voluntary use by the passengers themselves on airlines with open seating policies, like Southwest.

Friendship Awareness

Target Users: 

Persons who are close friends or family, who want a better grasp of how each others’ lives are going and have their virtual interactions have an additional layer of depth and awareness.

Communication Need: 

How many times have you gotten a random phone call in the middle of a class or important business meeting? What if your friends and family were aware of your schedule (as made available by shared events in your Google Calendar), and when they tried to call or text you they would get a message telling them where you currently are and why you might be busy or not available to answer their call? What if users could convey their mood—through colors, images or labels—to give their friends a better idea of how they are feeling, to motivate a phone call or a conversation (in the event that said person is sad, for instance) or to prevent an irritable conversation (in the event that said person is angry or in a bad mood). What if something could suggest that you and a friend get together to grab coffee or share a meal during segments of your GCal that both you and your friend have free? Or upon freely disclosed changes in location information, you could see which of your friends is nearby and free to chat or hang out. That’s the idea. There are a lot of layers to it but essentially it helps you “manage” your friends and keep up with all the people that you value in such a way that is much better than just keeping this all in your head.

Context: 

This tackles the communication problem of giving users insight into their friends’ current state and context (where they might be, how they are feeling, if they are busy or not) tapping into tools like GCal that we use to organize our daily lives. This would make it easier to "catch up" with your friends, finding times when you’re not all busy, and prevent starting conversations over phone, text or email when one individual is unavailable, preventing the likelihood of that person seeing your message and ignoring it in that moment, unintentionally never to address it again.