Select Work

Sustained by Design

Team Project | 2010 - 2011 | Capstone Project

Team: Homer Ong, Owen Schoppe, K. Pachikov

For designers who want to engage in sustainability, but dont know how.
Sustained by Design is a set of tools that integrate a sustainability lens into user-centered design.
The tools are intended for the product definition process and are applicable from user-research to early concept generation.
A key feature of the toolkit is the merger of user and environmental criteria - leading to concepts that are both desirable and sustainable. Unlike many existing tools, this toolkit is meant to generate new ideas rather than evaluate existing objects.
From engineers through planners, we believe everyone has a role to play in sustainable design. This toolkit augments the expertise of user-centered designers - who have the power to set products on a sustainable course.
More about this project here http://sustainedbydesign.org

How Badges Work

Team Project | Summer 2010 | Research, Analysis & Communication

Team: Thom van der Doef, K. Pachikov

Badges are hot. But what are they really?
For this exploratory research project, we set out to develop a taxonomy of badges and an understanding of how badges function. We began by looking at the object, but user research made us look past the badge and see the person wearing it. We learned that badges are an element in a system, which expresses shared values among group members.
One of the most exciting aspects of this project was conducting extreme user research. Our participants ranged from Christian motorcyclists to bike messengers, reformed gang members to former Girl Scouts, Freemasons to Foursquarers. Each participant contributed something unique to our findings, but the most fascinating thing was to find that while these groups are very different, their use of badges was not.

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Collaborative Science Labs

Team Project | Summer 2010 | Research, Analysis & Communication

Team: Owen Schoppe, K. Pachikov

At first is seemed obvious.
Outdated classrooms with desk-bound students just need a little internet to get kids to interact with science data in a whole new way. But when we started our research, we learned that pushing technology into already busy classrooms is just giving over-stretched teachers another box to check.
Thankfully, our client agreed at taking a more teacher-centered point of view. Through insights and sketch-concepts we pushed their idea of a peer-generated science curriculum to integrate with how teachers currently develop, adapt and share curriculum.
As our final deliverable for the client, we created a poster with insights and concepts across the the whole teacher and student experience. Since the client is so early in the project, we left white space on the poster for them to add their own ideas as they develop.

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Women and Healthy Eating: Insight Cards for Data Persistence

Individual Project | Fall 2009 | Analysis & Communication

After a final presentation to a client, what can we do to make sure our findings remain relevant and remembered? One tool may be insight cards, which can connect the client's product developers to the data and insights in one fun and portable package. These 25 cards come with a matrix that shows related categories, so a product designer working on, for example, Pyrex storage containers will immediately see that storage relates to portability but not portion size.

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Women and Healthy Eating: Interactive Presentation

Team Project | Fall 2009 | Analysis & Communication

Team: Judd Morgenstern, K. Pachikov

Pyrex has cooking solved. The problem is that no one is really cooking anymore. How lead-user research can help Pyrex leave the kitchen.
In this presentation, a short introductory movie provides an overview of our findings while interactive "cards" allow the clients to navigate the data themselves: skimming and digging in wherever they want. The package even includes a short tutorial, to ensure that should this presentation be shared without us, a client will be able to navigate it with ease.

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Women and Healthy Eating: Fresh from the Field

Individual Project | Fall 2009 | Analysis & Communication

We don't always get the luxury to talk about our research when we're ready - our clients may be calling when we've only just got back from the proverbial field. For this project on "Women and Healthy Eating" we were asked to tell a good story at the very beginning phase of our analysis: a story with a point of view but one that kept open the possibility of change and new discoveries as the analysis progressed. For our "client," I did a hand-drawn poster that painted a broad picture the research participants' interactions with food (both healthy and unhealthy) throughout a typical day. To keep it open, there is very little text on the poster, but each vignette relates directly to quotes and scenes in the research.

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Redefining the Open House Experience

Team Project | Fall 2009 | Research, analysis & communication

Team: Thom van der Doef, Hannah Swart, K. Pachikov

In order to understand the Open House experience our team conducted a combination of intercepts, shadowing and at-home interviews with 22 research participants throughout November 2009. Analyzing our findings, we saw that open house visitors are people in the exploratory phases of their search who are finding themselves on a blind date with the agent at the door. Our research made us understand the great desire of open house visitors for personal space and opportunities to imagine and reflect. Our poster described how one company can set itself apart from the competition by providing open house visitors with the tools they need to support their exploration while at the same time creating ties that will turn these casual strollers into serious clients.

For our poster presentation, we wanted to speak directly to our findings and opportunity scenario without losing the close connection to the data. So we included flaps to literally 'back up' our findings with quotes and photos from the research.