An initial meeting with Steve was held at his home, to learn about his daily life and develop an idea for an electronic device that would help him complete daily tasks more effectively. The solution can take any form but will be specifically tailored for his needs.
Prior to our meeting with Steve, we spent a lot of time crafting particular questions and activities that would enhance our ability to better understand his needs and expectations for the project. Our goal was to observe the context of his living environment, and uncover factors of his daily routine that may benefit from an assistive device. Below is our agenda with Steve:
Touchstone tour + home visit (15-20 min)
Flexible Modeling (15 min)
We would like to hear your idea and combine it with the observations we just heard
Photographs from Buggy, and Chess Score Sheet.
Steve earned his Metallurgy degree from CMU. He was an avid buggy builder and racer in his days at CMU, and he shared some of his old buggy racing photos with us. Steve is in his upper 60s and is currently working once a week for a furnace company which focuses on building large scale furnaces for industrial metal working. Work has kept him busy through life. After retirement, Steve remains active through playing and teaching chess, and traveling for work. Steve was a cross country runner at CMU, and still wants to remain physically active. He likes to walk many places and spend time on the treadmill at the JCC.
We learned that Steve wants to keep an alert mind and does this by reading, playing chess, teaching at the JCC, and interacting with others. If he isn’t doing any of those activities, he can be found working or watching old TV shows. He especially likes Hawaii Five-0 and CSI style shows.
We also observed that his current solution ideas focus on learning and decreasing small frustrations or inconveniences in his life. One his greatest inconveniences is his disorganization, causing him to lose things.
Through our discussion, we uncovered three potential ideas to help Steve:
Overall the conversation was very amiable, although he was hesitant to participate in the design actives we prepared. Also, it felt like the invitation to participate in the project stretched him a little bit.
Chess Set Given at Retirement.
The idea of exploring potential areas of assistance not only opened up Steve to providing more context to his day, but also highlighted the process of various activities and actions he takes. By the end of our discussion he had opened up and we began talking about about staying in contact to test our prototypes with him, at his convenience.
Overall, the meeting was very positive and Steve was excited to meet with us and work with us in the coming weeks. We are still in the process of synthesizing our interview into a specific direction. This is fine, but due to the difficulty of uncovering more specifics around the daily processes Steve makes, we will need to continue to develop the conversation with him to make sure our ideating truly meets his needs.
We strayed from our meeting plan to suite the comfort of Steve. During the interview, Steve was initially hesitant to participating in the planned activities. However, casual conversation with intended design questions in mind enhanced our ability to understand more about Steve and the things he struggles with daily. We feel that framing our intentions to Steve before the actual meeting would have given us better participation. Also, having more potential ideas on hand to meet his needs could have been more effective than just the three we brought. It was effective to provide natural conversation and a strong framework to encourage people to participate in an activity outside of their comfort zone in order to uncover more.
Meeting Steve in his home was valuable to understand his environment and the things that he values. In future meetings we may meet him at other locations around Pittsburgh that are familiar to Steve to observe other potential environments where we could make an positive impact.
So far, each of us had a slightly different insights and take aways from our meeting. We do not know what we are going to prototype yet, as we need to research the implementation options for the initial ideas. Over the next week we are looking forward to discussing, affinity mapping, and analyzing our next steps.
]]>We are students at Carnegie Mellon University taking a class in physical computing, a project-based course in which we learn the basic skills in programming and electronics to build simple interactive devices. Throughout this course and each project, we have been challenged to raise the bar and use our newfound knowledge to create fun, interactive, and creative devices. Our current and final project challenges us to make a device that would benefit not ourselves but someone else. We were assigned to meet with Joseph, an older gentlemen from the Pittsburgh community, and to create a device that would somehow benefit his life. The device doesn’t need to be anything grand or hold commercial value, it is simply specifically designed to help out Joseph by solving a troublesome aspect of his life. Our group, the Dog-Loving Duo, consisting of Kristie, Logan, and Chirag (who came along to help out Logan and me because of his design expertise) met with Joseph at his apartment in downtown Pittsburgh on Friday, March 30. There, we talked about our lives and what types of technology we could build.
Meeting with Joseph in his beautiful apartment
Before the meeting, we met on Thursday to plan for the meeting and divide up roles to make the meeting run smooth. Logan was assigned as our picture taker, Kristie was the talker, and Chirag was the note taker.
Initial Plan for meeting:
Placed these ideas next to him to keep the meeting focused and unconsciously get him thinking about these ideas and as reminders in case he forgot
Ideas for different areas of his life we could improve
During this meeting we learned a lot about Joseph’s life and identified several areas where we could create devices to help. Joseph is retired from sales and marketing and used to work for Gatorade from the time the company first started. We learned that Joseph is a dog owner, avid reader, and enjoys going on walks with his wife. He is also a vegan and has a fascination with technology and learning new things as he enjoys taking classes through Carnegie Mellon’s Osher program and at UPitt.
We came up with a few different ideas based on problems Joseph brought up and his various interests. After discussing practicality, we narrowed it down to three ideas, but haven’t decided which of the three to use and the specifics of each idea yet.
Ideas for Projects:
While we were talking, Joseph mentioned that it’s sometimes difficult for him to stay awake during the classes he takes. He also mentioned that when the previous group who is working with his wife came to visit, they showed him someone’s device for staying awake and he really liked it. Ironically, this device was created by our group member, Kristie. Therefore, our first idea is to expand on this device by making it wireless, more compact, and try out new ideas other than a motion sensor attached to a pencil to detect if someone is awake or not.
Cabinet in his house
Refrigerator in his house
Joseph mentioned that it’s difficult to remember what he already has in his cabinets/refrigerator and hard to find food in them. This causes him and his wife to buy more food than they need since they didn’t realize they had the food already because it was hidden in their cabinets or refrigerator. Therefore, we discussed potentially creating a device outside of his cabinet that could keep track of what is currently in his cabinets or refrigerator and what shelf it’s on. We also thought it would be convenient if the device could beep or light up when he runs out of something so he knows.
Book Shelf in his apartment
Joseph mentioned that he enjoys reading books, but it is sometimes difficult to remember where he left off, especially since he is usually reading more than one book at a time for his various book clubs. Therefore, we discussed creating a device that could keep track of where he was in each of his books.
We think the meeting went very smoothly. We didn’t quite follow the agenda we created as our meeting was a lot more like a regular conversation and just flowed naturally. We did get derailed a bit, but Chirag always helped bringing the group back on track. Joseph was very easy to talk to and his dog was adorable (hence the group name). Also, him and his wife were very friendly making us snacks and offering tea. The snacks were very delicious and it was sweet of them to make them for us! The only difficulty was the fact that his wife was there as the meeting was supposed to be with just Joseph. We felt awkward suggesting she leave and felt it was unavoidable since they’re a couple. His wife was very nice though and only talked about her husband, so we still mostly stayed on track despite her being there. We were quite surprised by Joseph’s love of technology as he uses Alexa, orders groceries online, and enjoys using photoshop. His interest in technology made the meeting run a lot smoother as did the fact that him and his wife met with the previous group already and therefore, knew what the project was about, so we didn’t need to explain it for too long and could just jump straight into talking about problems. Overall, our meeting went well and we wish we had more time to talk to Joseph as it was a lot of fun and we could have fleshed out our ideas a bit more.
]]>Team: Red Chameleon
Members: Ryan, Willow, Chileshe
We are students at Carnegie Mellon University taking a Physical Computing course, where we learn both mechanical and programming skills to create devices to improve daily tasks such as alarms that alert us when laundry is done or a refrigerator timer to prevent food from spoiling. On Friday, March 30th, we met with Philip, who lives in Squirrel Hill, at his home to see if we can apply the skills we’ve attained to help better a part of his life that he too finds inconvenient. Although he lives alone, he finds time to interact with his community by joining social clubs where he edits newsletters for one of them every month, so there was a lot to learn through our meeting with him.
-Bring colored pen and paper, PassBox project, and a laptop.
INTRO
-Introduce ourselves and our intentions.
-Demo Ryan’s PassBox, and explain how it relates to our project.
-Ask for permission to take photos.
INTERVIEW
-Ask about general difficulties.
-Aspects of Daily Life:
-Technological aspect:
DRAWING
-What kind of gadget would be of most use to you?
-Brainstorm ideas by drawing it out, and ask for feedback.
WRAP-UP
-Take photos!
-Tell him project schedule:
Philip discussed his lack of a working mobile phone. In addition, during our discussions with him, he made use of a hearing aid. It seems that Philip also has difficulty reaching his telephone as a result of these two things. His computer does not work all the time, and he expressed a desire for it to be fixed, and for a proper notification system. Philip seems to really like puzzles of all sorts, it seems to be his main past-time, besides writing. For example, he usually had a new newspaper each morning in order to work on puzzles, and he has a hobby of working on novel chess problems. Philip is also member of the Explorer’s Club of Pittsburgh, in which he functions as a writer and chronicler. He also participates in the JCC, where he goes often for a shower and lunch. Observations of his home included, by his description, a lack of organization, and a desire for more stringent guidelines for getting rid of excess. Philip likes to annotate and systemize his photographs for future reference, and to fuel his genealogy hobby. In the near future, Philip hopes to clear out the clutter in his home, and to make a trip to Washington D.C, and a number of surrounding areas.
1ST THEME – PUZZLE
2ND THEME – ORGANIZATION
The meeting went on for 2 hours, which is much longer than we expected. We were not able to do an initial sketch of a possible idea as in our schedule. Philip tended to detract a bit from the initial direction of our discussion, which was entirely fine because he seemed to strongly emphasize his independence. We took this discussion as an opportunity to learn what he really finds enjoyment in his daily life. He found it difficult to focus on the scope of our physical computing project, where he stated no recognition of difficulties which could be within its scope. He often mentioned ideas of projects that he would love to see in the world, like robots that picks up papers and organizes them for him. However, he recognized a product like that is very ideal and not possible to make for students like us.
As far as our personal opinions go, Ryan and Chileshe tended to prefer a slightly more formal approach to the meeting, and Willow was significantly more casual. Her conversational style opened Philip to suggestion, while Ryan took notes, and Chileshe assisted in attempts to steer the discussion.
Looking back, we wished that it would have been possible to focus on the assistive device. Philip was extremely genial, to the extent that he was very open with the more difficult aspects of his organizational projects, which he perceived as requiring a form of AI not currently available. Perhaps providing more examples online of what Physical Computing students work on would have been more helpful to Philip, and to our discussion with him.
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Our team, Enrique’s Gizmos, consisting of Matt, Alicia, and Nick, are working together to create such a device. This device is meant to be designed specifically at solving a troublesome feature in one person’s life, and to accomplish this, we are meeting with an older individual, Enrique, to understand what their life is like and help ideate what could be created to make it better.
The meeting was held in a small frozen yogurt shop in the Squirrel Hill area of Pittsburgh on the evening of Friday, March 30th. Matt, Alicia, and Enrique sat down over some frigid dairy and discussed our lives, what we liked to do, and, of course, what we could build. Through many interesting conversations, drawings, and some demos of past projects, we came up with a list of important and intriguing projects including a GPS alert system and a brain-game compilation.
Agenda for the meeting
Matt presenting his Project 2
Enrique going through the projects in the course gallery
Meeting setup!
We learned a lot over the course of the meeting. Though the main goal of the meeting was to come up with designs for our assistive device, we learned a lot about Enrique, as well. For example, we talked about his family and what he likes to do. Some interesting notes on this aspect of the meeting was learning that he is a civil engineer who both teaches and has written a book.
The other aspect of the meeting was the project ideation. One idea that Enrique really liked was some sort of tracking device for older people so that if they forget where they are or if they get lost, family members can find them. This could be a good project, except Enrique has no need for this because he doesn’t have Alzheimers and he said his family members can always find him with his “electronic leash” (his cellphone). We also learned that a lot of older people don’t want to try new technologies because there are too many and it’s overwhelming for them. They want to stick to the old tech that they are familiar with, but the new tech provides more functionality which they want. So, Enrique thinks that rather than creating new tech for them, creating services would be more beneficial. He said that he would offer a GPS tracking service rather than selling the tracking device because they’d pay for the service! However, since this project is to create a gizmo for Enrique, we’ll have to prioritize ease of use and motivation.
We also talked about how many older people are depressed and feel little motivation to improve their physical and mental health. This might be a difficult task to tackle because motivation stems from different places for different people. Enrique finds it hard to motivate himself to physically exercise, but he is able to find the motivation to mentally exercise by working on his book. Perhaps if we make him something fun and a little competitive, he can motivate his friends to exercise with him. One idea that was brought up in terms of motivation was the possible use of a game or some type of tracking that would encourage people to walk a little more or do a few more mental exercises.
Some other possible designs that were brought up included an inventory system that would help prevent older people from collecting and forgetting about things they have, a compact heart monitor to be used as early detection before going to a hospital, a house information (heat, electricity, efficiency) tracker, and a gripper that mimics a persons hand for ease of use.
Ideas we came up with during the meeting
Second page of ideas
Our meeting went very smoothly. It was easy to talk to Enrique, and he had many things to say about our project, Pittsburgh, and life in general. We found that it was hard to follow the agenda exactly because our conversation flowed so well; we didn’t feel the need to prompt him or to push the conversation in a certain direction. We ended up hitting all the bases on our agenda regardless. At first we were a little worried that he thought the project was meant for older people in general because he kept talking about problems that older people had, but then he brought it back to himself with examples of how such a project would be useful for him. Some of the final project ideas, though unique and useful, seemed a bit complex or outside of our scope. If we were to do the meeting again, it might be useful to include a specific section where we talk about daily or household tasks specifically to inspire other types of devices. Overall, however, the meeting was very enjoyable and we were able to create a number of ideas.
]]>On Thursday night (3/30), our group, Team Renfrew (consisting of Adriel, Arushi, and Monica), made a trip to an apartment in Downtown Pittsburgh to meet a wonderful couple, Rosemarie and Joe. The goal of our meeting was to get to know Rosemarie on a more personal level so that we may create a device that would address a problem in her life, but would also be aesthetically pleasing to her from a design standpoint.
The aftermath of the amazing spread Rosemarie prepared for our meeting.
What to bring: Phone camera, Paper, Pen, Macbook
Outline of meeting:
Discussion Topics:
Questions:
Things she loves
Technology she has – how it satisfies/frustrates her
Improvements she would like to see in her life
Thoughts on technology in general
Thoughts after holding the meeting and discussing as a team
During the meeting, we asked many of the questions we planned to, and we got to know both Rosemarie and Joseph pretty well as people. On a person-to-person level, I think the meeting went great. I think we did less brainstorming for new ideas than we would’ve originally hoped, but we learned a lot about things Rosemarie and Joseph enjoy in life and what they are passionate about as individuals. None of us expected such hospitality and investment/willingness to help in the project as Rosemarie showed us. Another key thing about Rosemarie was how connected her and Joesph were – I wasn’t sure if we should try to talk to her individually, but from the conversation it seems that they do almost all their activities together. Even though the meeting went pretty long (almost an hour and a half), at the end as we left, we were still asking questions, and talking as a group, so I definitely think we could have been able to talk more. Some questions I think we could’ve talked more on is what they think about communicating with friends and family (originally Rosemarie expressed it being hard to reach some other older friends, but talked about how much she loved Facebook). Also, as we were describing past projects, one of the couple labelled it as “interactive art” and I think that term fits perfectly – I wish we could have talked about art in this way more and about how “practical” or “interactive” art is a part of their life – it may have sparked some ideas. They talked about their love to travel and the places they had been, but when we asked about if they experience any difficulty packing, or in the airport, it seemed like they were very self-dependent (in most activities they did every day, this was the case), and there was no outstanding way to incorporate a technology into these. I think maybe if we had slowed down the conversation a little, we could get to the underlying ways in which technology could have helped them in small tasks doing Rosemarie loves such as traveling, hosting book club meetings, going on daily walks, etc. Overall, however, we though the meeting went very, very well and we look forward to sharing this relationship with Rosemarie and Joseph. We were so impressed by the hospitality the couple showed us and the experiences they were willing to share with us, and it definitely made all of our days!
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