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Homework #17: Thinking about Design Thinking

1: Nike – Design Thinking Infuses Everything Nike Does (It All Starts with the CEO)

Nike is very concerned with the individual needs of those they design for. In the empathize stage, Nike says they take into account suggestions from their employees who live all over the world and in all different communities and cultures. Their next step of defining the needs of their customer really comes down to performance and style. Nike is typically making shoes for athletes s they take into consideration the functionality of the shoe, however, they are also aware that the general public wears sneakers as a fashion statement and need to make them stylish and on trend. Nike has worked with many designers in their ideate stage. They pick designers who will be able to bring innovative ideas, one of the most important things for them. In terms of prototyping, Nike experiments with different types of materials in order to make a product that is both functional and luxury to some standard. Nike is probably most involved in the testing stage. Since they are such a popular and high profile company, Nike receives plenty of feedback on their products. Star athletes and the general public alike all have plenty to say about Nike shoes.

My thoughts on Nike’s design process make me believe that they care a lot about the function as well as the quality of their shoes. They have to make sure athletes will feel comfortable competing in them as well as models wanting to wear them as a fashion statement. Nikes process must be a grueling one to meld those two worlds.

2: Uber Eats – Creating the Future of Food Delivery through Design Thinking

Uber Eats talks bout how in the empathize process they try to immerse  themselves in the culture of the place they are looking into expanding towards in order to bring a customized service. Uber Eats has even opened up chat rooms so that while defining their service they can receive real-time feedback from their customers and will know what their needs are. Even the defining process is a group effort, and they hold conferences and talks to generate new ideas for their app. While developing prototypes, designers for the app go into the real world, like restaurants and delivery vehicles, in order to test and adapt while they create updates and new experiences within the app. Their team has tons of tests that they run which allows for a better end result. They test in controlled groups in order to determine the success of the project in the area and welcome feedback the entire time.

Uber Eat’s design process seemed very similar to the way Roger Whitehouse described building, “a set of approximate prototypes based on whatever information we could gather, test them with an appropriate group of users, then use that information to build another set,” in The Uniqueness of Individual Perception. Uber Eats recognizes how important it is to provide an experience that can be maneuvered and enjoyed by all, which requires a lot of trial and error. Whitehouse and Uber Eats both ran multiple prototype tests to put out the best product they could.

 

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Homework #13 Hashtags

12: #dublincore #me #standards

Abstract: #project2 #intp-t #moodboard

11 memes: #memes #memelord #memequeen

11: #memes #realmemes #lifechanged

9: #technology #twitter #writing

Anonymous Data: #security #data #privacy

Data Visualization: #chart #wordcloud #data

DIKW: #computers #programs #jobs

What Is Technology: #technology #efficiency #hacking

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Homework #12: Dublin Core

  1. Title: Jamie Irwin
  2. Creator: Mitchell and Ann Marie Irwin
  3. Subject: College Student
  4. Description: Energetic, 5’5″, female, easy going
  5. Publisher: The Universe
  6. Contributor: Mitchell and Ann Marie Irwin
  7. Date: March 10, 2000
  8. Type: Human
  9. Format: 3D object
  10. Identifier: Jamie
  11. Source: Mitchell and Ann Marie Irwin
  12. Language: English
  13. Relation: Emily Irwin (sister)
  14. Coverage: Not School
  15. Rights: Constitutional
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Abstract

My personality type after taking the test is INTP-T. I know this is very accurate because of results I’ve gotten from this test before and the traits they describe. Some points I’ve gathered from my personality’s description are: my value of honesty, my ability to get lost in my own head daydreaming from time to time, not being the most out going, sometimes being what some might say insensitive, and having the terrible habit of overthinking and second guessing myself. I hope to focus on these five statements about my personality in my slides, and also include some things about me that might not be expected of an INTP. This personality type does a good job of describing me, but here are definitely some things that it either got wrong or are unique to me. The audience that I’d like to focus my project on is my roommate/friends as I feel like this would be the most fun and I won’t have to be as reserved with my selections. By choosing this audience, I’ll be able to make the style of my project more my own and creative rather than professional. I hope my style to include images and words similar to mood boards that you’d see on Instagram or tumblr.

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DTC: Homework #11 Memes

New ideas or “memes” are something that I inevitably run into every single day in real life and on the internet. Sometimes I specifically look through social media and the web in order to find ways to better my life or find new perspectives; however, rarely do these ideas I find stick with me and actually become true memes in my own head. For and idea to be meme it has to find a way to connect with people and give them a reason to keep it around and keep spreading it. Dan Dennett in “Dangerous Memes” explains the origin behind the philosophy of “memes” as viruses which spread from one brain to another throughout generations until ideas essentially become a new kind of gene. I see how this concept quickly spreads through the internet due to old memes which have been around for years now having access to new platforms and billions of people more readily being exposed to them.

For me an idea online which has more or less changed my day to day is the sudden influx and popularity of beauty gurus and social media influencers. This is not necessarily one idea, but it all works towards selling something. The package that they all try to push is that whatever they’re doing will make their audiences life better as well.  It’s scary to think that younger, more vulnerable people, and even myself, hears the ideas of these online presences and cannot shake the notion of possibly obtaining a higher quality of life by buying into their sales pitch. Dennett is quoted by Abby Rabinowitz in “The Meme as Meme” saying, “I don’t know about you, but I’m not initially attracted by the idea of my brain as a sort of dung heap in which the larvae of other peoples’ ideas renew themselves.” I resonate with this and the idea that memes are a virus because sometimes the ideas we think we come up with on our own have really just been planted. I go through points where I find it quite scary that memes might secretly be controlling aspects of my life, and times where I don’t entirely mind it as these ideas are being spread for the purpose of making humans more well adjusted to evolutionary change.

That’s not saying that everything I’ve ever been told on the internet by social media “stars” has had a negative impact on my life. For example, they have plenty of content which I enjoy for entertainment or educational purposes. Matt Ridley in “When Ideas Have Sex” tells of the ways people can take memes or ideas and change them for the better or to better suit their purposes. Tips and tricks that I’ve learned from watching content created by influencers is already modified information which I then take and alter to work better for me personally. I’d like to think that by taking ideas and changing them, I’m not blindly following but adjusting to the changes in the world. While the spread of beauty gurus and influencers has become a way to influence mainstream media, it still holds value in that they provide what people want, and it makes people believe that their lives are getting better through joining this community online.

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DTC Homework #9

“And lest we forget, text itself is an invention, a technology. We treat it, however, as a base-level given in thinking about the essence of a message or a piece of communication.” – Maria Popova

In this quote Maria Popova points out that in our ever-changing world of technology, we forget that the things we have grown so used to were once brand new. People hold literature on such higher standings than modern technology even though what they think to be superior was once something to be wary of. When thought of in this way Twitter should really be thought of as nothing less than any other form of writing. Just as writing once became an essential part of communication (letters, emails, texts, etc.) Twitter could very well be headed the same direction. Everyone learns how to write in school and they use those skills learned to develop ideas into larger pieces of texts like essays. However, now people aren’t spending the majority of their time reading long winded articles or even blog posts. Being able to condense information into 280 characters is a valuable skill to have. People get their news and entertainment from the same source now, and in the same format. It’s not crazy to think that eventually kids will be taught how to cram the most information into a tweet, or how to make a cohesive thread. Writing changes with the times, and as we continue to make new ways to communicate it will have to adapt. Plays used to be written to last all day and provide a longer entertainment, but now that we have books and movies and the internet, no one’s focus has to be on one thing for any longer than they want it to be. While new inventions continue to draw our attention thinner, the normalcy of writing changing all together seems like a plausible solution to keep people consuming information.

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DTC 101: Anonymous Data

In terms of data privacy I probably have very bad browsing habits. I regularly use websites which use cookies and subscribe to emails and other offers from sites I frequent. I allow Google Chrome to save all of my passwords and information just to make giving my data to other companies more convenient for me. I guess I’m not particularly mindful of where my data is going just because nothing I do on my computer is so private that it would be a disaster if it were leaked. In order to market towards me companies would only need to look at my online purchases and frequently viewed items. It seems as if I do most of my shopping online now with all of the free 2 day shipping options and all of my buying habits are out in the open. It’s obvious to me now even that the ads I get on my browser are tailored towards me based off of my internet searches and browsing history. I can also see this being transferred to my social media account as now I am seeing adds tailored to what I would usually only see as banners. As bad as it is, I like having ads come up that I’m actually interested in as apposed to those I really would find it annoying to be in the way of my feed. Recently, I’ve even noticed that it’s not just my actions online that affect the ads being placed in front of me, but what I say as well. There have been too many times that ads have popped up for things that I specifically remember having conversations about, but would never be interested in buying.

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Data Visualization Blog Post

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/9dhv4e/sankey_graph_of_my_phone_spam_problem_charted/

This example of data visualization is a network map arranged from broad sets of data down to more specific categories. In this map the data being represented is one persons phone calls over the course of one year. It starts with only two main categories after the initial number of total calls, spam and trusted, before it gets very specific, who the actual caller was. The thickness of the lines shows the frequency if the caller, and the lines are easy to differentiate due to their difference in color. From all of this information I was able to learn that the vast majority of this person’s phone calls were spam calls, most of those unidentified. It seemed to be particularly useful to use this type of data visualization because of the sheer number of factors contributing to the data set; it is all arranged well enough that it doesn’t become confusing to look at. This would be particularly useful for people easily susceptible to scams. By analyzing and recognizing trends for scam phone calls, those people can be informed of the attributes and nature of scammers. I also find interest in the fact that this person has called their repair shop more times than their sister.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/9dj53m/oc_one_india_equal_in_love_indian_supreme_court/

The data visualization above could only be described as a word cloud. It depicts words used in high frequency in tweets after India’s Supreme Court ruled out the criminalization of homosexuality. The bigger the word, the more times it was used in tweets. The format of this data visualization is important to the message being conveyed. With words like “love,” “LGBT,” and “India” having the most space in the image, a lot of attention is first drawn to them. Even smaller words still carry only positive messages which shows the campaign of the data. Certainly there must have been some hateful comments that were excluded form this research, so not the entire picture is shown. Besides that though, I learned of apparent overwhelming support of India’s Supreme Court decision, and I was able to learn it very quickly. There wasn’t a lot if thought or analyzing that had to go into this in order to interpret the results of the collected data. It’s interesting as to why they picked so many words the be green. There doesn’t seem to be any sort of pattern to the coloring of words, yet the grouping of green draw the eye to those 6 or 7 right by each other.

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DIKW Blog Post

Cathy O’Neil outlines in “Weapons of Math Destruction” forms of data processing that is intended to replace and aid in human decision making. These programs try to interpret data and produce outcomes as similarly as an actual person would.

One of the programs, IMPACT, which measures teachers’ efficiency in the class room. O’Neil describes the process of DIKW for this particular system. The data was represented by the students’ math and language test scores. The information was how well the students were interpreted to have done based on the test scores. Knowledge in this case was determining performance of teachers based on student performance. Finally, wisdom became the ultimate decision of whether or not to fire an under performing educator based on the results. This model, as many teachers and O’Neil pointed out, does not accurately reflect the capabilities in other aspects of the teachers. For one it does nothing to show the characteristics of the teachers and how well they communicate and connect with their students. It also does nothing to account for the students whose under performance may be due to external factors and have nothing to do with their education at all. Even the data to begin with could have been inaccurate with teachers boosting student’s test scores in order to make themselves look better.

Another instance of a machine making human decisions is the Kronos personality test for job applicants. Data such as location, age, race, gender, and mental health is collected from resumes and personality tests. The information is then processed and categorizes people based on their responses. this information is then giving the computers the knowledge, based on the criteria in the system, who would be good candidates of employment. The computer uses a form of wisdom then when deciding which prospects to send through the system to the hiring executives who decide from there who gets an interview and who gets hired. The flaws in this system are endless, but one that stands out is the computer attempting to make decisions some people don’t even get right. Businesses looking to hire themselves have their own biases and prejudices, but when they simply throw those into a computer system and allow it to weed those undesirables out, even more people are excluded. Using systems like this only worsen an already unfair job market and make it easier to discriminate based on superficial attributes. Computers shouldn’t be given the opportunity to interpret their own wisdom and have that affect the lives of real people.