Growing Up

Team Sarah Adams, Tom Harman, Tash Wong

Challenge
Save isn’t only a function that occurs on computers or with photographs. It embodies our connection to information on a physical and emotional level. It can even inform how we identify ourselves to the rest of the world.

Concept and prototype a way to improve a particular behavior around saving things. This could seek to alter the emotions behind saving, how or where we save, or anything in between.

Approach
We began this project by brainstorming around a few different areas: Saving memories, saving bikes from the mean streets of New York, and saving food from a long-lingering death in the fridge. After a couple of sessions we decided to focus on ‘saving memories’, specifically saving memories of childhood.

As there is a lot of work being done in this domain we took the time to investigate existing applications. These include Facebook Timeline, Storytree, and a number of baby book web apps, which all seek to make it a little easier to keep track of the day to day. After this research we still felt that something was missing. 

At the end of a long hard day at work, how many parents are excited to upload photos of their child, as well as write out a few notes about it? 

Outcome
 Our solution to this problem is Growing Up, a concept web service that allows parents to save stories about their children as they happen using the medium of email. Media saved to the site can be organized and output as a physical artifact, such as a book or postcard.

Using email as the primary mode of recording enables parents to use a medium they’re already comfortable with an generally have available to them throughout the day. Also, the burden of collecting and organizing albums could is mitigated by adding to a collection of stories about a child gradually.

Given the tight 3 week time frame for this project, we the project down into component parts. Sarah took the lead on creating a video to communicate the concept, while Tom and I focused on the interactions with the service. This spanned copy writing, user flows, wireframes, and data vis.

  • During a our white boarding sessions we worked through questions such as:
  • What is the personality of Growing Up?
  • What does the email feel like? What is the tone? What kinds of questions does it ask?
  • How do we create an interface that supports someone else’s stories + content? 
  • How do we make the amount of information held by the site accessible to the user?
  • How can we encourage people to revisit their information? How do we let them know how much they have stored?
  • How do we help people share their information not only digitally, but physically?

3 notes

Show

  1. tashwong posted this

Blog comments powered by Disqus