Ad@pt, founded by Melissa Chapman and Willy Morgan
Ad@pt provides illustrated adoption timelines, which are designed to give families a bite-size, digestable glance at all of the adoption options. This way, when a family calls an adoption agency, they feel informed and in control. Our product hosts and helps manage digital copies of the adoption paperwork throughout the process so that, in the end, families have an easy-to-access and secure access to this important content on their mobile devices.

Spoak, founded by Callie Thompson, Eli Robinson, and Dave Gottlieb
Spoak is an app that evokes audio stories based on personal photos of artifacts, people, places and events. Transform memories into dynamic stories. Invite family and friends to record their own versions and bring shared history to life.

CareWell, founded by Eric Boggs and Chuck Hildebrand
Other caregiving task management systems are little more than bandaids. They fail to connect caregivers with long-term, motivated helpers. They fail to address the fundamental fear, anxiety, grief and guilt that are a natural part of caregiving. CareWell offers practical and emotional relief for people who are helping an ailing or aging loved one. It equips caregivers with powerful delegation and task management tools to tame overwhelming logistics of caregiving. It also addresses issues of fear, isolation, burn out and guilt through stress-free recruiting of motivated helpers, planning guides and ‘system at a glance’ tools.

Kites and Ladders, founded by Bethany Stolle and Jesse Jack
Kites and Ladders allows families with autistic children to negotiate this communication gap with a shared visual communication system. Our product includes a wearable biometric sensor for tracking emotional state, a camera app for the child to visually express their point of view, and a photo editing app that allows the child to customize photos and share them with a private network of family and caregivers.

Bring Up, founded by Will Mederski and Kevin McCann
By sending parents SMS text messages with classroom highlights each night, bringup gives parents insight into the school day so they may have meaningful conversations with their children anywhere. bringup builds a bridge between the classroom and home.

Congratulations to all eleven of our graduates. We’re extremely proud of you!

The post Presenting the Graduating Class of 2013 appeared first on Austin Center for Design.

Beginning a half century ago, scientists and engineers were credited for doing amazing things at the time. They put a man on the moon, invented the pacemaker, and put a calculator in our pockets. Society regarded engineering as a highly respected profession. They were truly changing the world through their own research, hypotheses, and personal competitive motivation. Engineers in a corporation were responsible making products and discovering new applications for technology.

In high school, I enjoyed and excelled in my science and math classes. No one was surprised in 2005 that I graduated college with an engineering degree, much like about 60,000 others in the US. I believe I represented the ideal STEM graduate: I enjoyed math and science at a young age, pushed myself in high school, studied electrical engineering and graduated with an employment offer. On paper, I am part of the solution, but realistically I’m part of the problem. 8 years later I’m not an engineer, and never want to be again. Roughly one half of Americans with engineering degrees do not work as an engineer. If there is such a shortage of engineers, why aren’t these seemingly qualified people taking those jobs?

My short engineering career was spent creating circuits and software to meet the specifications in a product requirement document. I was lucky enough to work in an industry I love, and for an employer which gave me some freedom to visit customers and make product decisions outside of my job description. Unfortunately such freedoms are rare in many companies. Now days, most engineers are kept in offices far away from customers, they work to build the product which the marketers and designers define. I realized this after two years as an engineer, and re-enrolled in school so I could have more influence over product creation and definition.

Marketing departments increasingly carry much of the responsibility to define new products. R&D or more specifically the engineers, who were once the competitive edge and pulse of a company are now just an expense line item on the income statement. (It’s interesting to notice that R&D, Research and Design now refers to technical personnel and expenses, while actual product research and design increasingly happens in the marketing department.)

Design is becoming the new competitive advantage which companies are investing in. My experience here at AC4D has been life changing, and I’m excited to rejoin the workforce as a designer. I’ll get the opportunities to drive change in society, create new products, and apply technology in new way. Oddly, that was the same reason I wanted to be an engineer.

For the past 9 months at AC4D, we learned how to ‘create’ new products and services through generative research, ideation, synthesis and prototyping. But since every designer is not also an electrical, software, industrial and mechanical engineer at the same time, we create product requirement documents, we draft wireframes, and sketch mockups.  We use these artifacts to communicate our intent to someone else with the skills to build make our idea into a reality. (e.g. engineers.)  At AC4D, faculty and a students alike (myself included) will say things like “just find a developer” or “we need a mechanical engineer” in the same way a farmer may say “I need someone to pick these berries” or Apple wants to find the cheapest labor to “just assemble this iPhone.”  Has engineering become a commodity resource?

Within the past few decades America began to outsource labor for textiles, electronics and internal processes among many other things. That’s not surprising as America’s economy is increasingly service based.  Labor and knowledge processes which were once important part of a company became line items on an income statement, just like engineering is now. It’s no surprise that some American companies now either outsource engineering labor, or hire engineers abroad to lower their expenses. If an engineer in the US can follow a specification document or make a webpage look like the wireframe, why can’t an engineer in China or India? Why should a college student in America study a field which is treated as a commodity resource by companies?

To recruit America’s most creative and intelligent students into engineering, we need to redefine engineering as a profession, not push middle school children in to math and science classes. Universities and employers should work together to incorporate design into curriculum and job responsibilities.

Students like myself are attracted to engineering to define and make things, not execute some else’s designs. Let’s add generative research and ideation courses to engineering curriculum and teach engineers how to approach ill-defined problems and service design. Companies should break down the cultural barriers between marketing and engineering. They should include engineers on customer visits, and co-mingle the designers and engineers at the beginning of the new product development cycle. The cultural shift needed to redefine the field of engineering is itself a wicked problem, and I look forward to chipping away at it wherever I may end up next.

The post Is the Design Movement Commoditizing Engineers? appeared first on Austin Center for Design.

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I ask Jesse this question as least once a week as we build Kites & Ladders, a business to amplify the voices of people with autism through tools that support self-expression and communication.

Why do I constantly pester Jesse about his availability? (And spend too much time in Google calendar?)

Our first Kites & Ladders product is the Harmony wristband, which uses biofeedback to help people on the autism spectrum become aware of their emotional state and express it to others. Getting to that point where people can purchase the Harmony wristband, though, requires collecting a bunch of biometric data, testing various wristband form factors, and validating the concept with kids on the autism spectrum, their parents, and experts in the field. Not to mention drawing on the wisdom of a number of engineers and industrial designers.

This means our calendars have been quite full over the last 6 weeks.

Early on, we discovered that we couldn’t find the right combination of sensors or get access to raw data using commercial fitness trackers. So Jesse soldered and sewed and hammered and coded and tinkered to create our own prototype. We can now collect data about the wearer’s heart rate and stress level and process it in a number of ways. Meanwhile, I sketched shapes, interfaces, and buttons to figure out what the device could look like in a more polished form down the road.

On top of building, we’ve had weekly meetings with at least two or three engineers, industrial designers, and leaders in autism or educational organizations to continue learning more about autism as well as hardware development.

Then there’s the testing…

Testing the Harmony wristband prototype.

So far, we’ve visited 9 homes and worked with 11 kids (both autistic and not) who tried out the wristband. As the device captured biometric data, we hung out and watched Annoying Orange videos (you’ve been warned–they’re annoying!), went to the library, observed piano lessons, paged through countless photos of ventilation systems, sat through frustrating homework assignments, and witnessed everyday life while taking notes about the child’s emotional state and environmental changes.

Heart rate and stress level data captured during a test session.

Through this process, we’ve become incredibly passionate about and committed to working in the autism space. One expert we spoke with said an autism diagnosis is often treated like a lid, not a ladder. Through Kites & Ladders work, we’ve met incredible individuals with autism who have a lot to offer the world. The challenge is how Kites & Ladders can support these people in reaching their potential.

So we carry that into the final weeks in our program. Our calendars are still filling up as we reach out to new people, test and refine our prototype, develop our business pitch, and figure out how to produce the Harmony wristband.

But those blocks of time encourage us, propel us forward, and remind us that we’re doing meaningful work.

The post Scheduling & Harmony appeared first on Austin Center for Design.

Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“How can I help” isn’t necessarily a simple question, and there isn’t always an easy answer. For much of my life, I’ve been observing a little something out there in the world. There are people who are porous to help, and there are people who are impervious to it. The ability to ask for and receive help is life changing. If you possess it, you have a big giant OPEN SESAME into connection, collaboration and belonging. And if you don’t, you are ever so slightly S-O-L. You’ll probably get by in life, but you’ll be at a high risk of being brittle, isolated and pretty worn out by the end of it.

In the first semester at AC4D, I dove into a design research mission. I wanted to see where the ability comes from and whether or not it can be taught. Here in the second semester, I’ve been in the trenches with the unflappable Eric Boggs taking the question ever farther. Can a digital system can work as training wheels for a person who needs help asking for help?

The Pilot

To recap for newcomers, Eric and I are building CareWell, a digital tool to help caregivers while they tend to aging loved ones.
Eric has spoken in a previous blog post about the mechanics of the pilot. I’ll address the outcomes and next steps.

1) Caregivers responded well to the task categories / bucket system we’d invented. They added a few, but by and large our initial impulse was correct. Good news for us as we are attempting to show that we understand the caregiver’s world.

2) It takes a minimum of 5 exchanges (text, call, email) for a caregiver to completely hand off a task and receive necessary updates. 5 exchanges multiplied across the numerous tasks a caregiver undertakes each week is an immense amount of communication to manage. There is benefit to having CareWell serve as the traffic controller. And it’s encouraging to see that we nailed this back there on day 1 of our project when we put up our first design pillars.

3) We knew from our research that helpers want to know exactly what they can do to help. What we did NOT know until we ran the pilot is that helpers often don’t help because they are afraid of burdening the caregiver. And there was no way of knowing, until we ran the pilot, something that is kind of a big deal. Our helpers prefer interacting with a text-based, digital system in place of communicating with the real live caregiever. They felt less intrusive, less burdensome, and less liable to be operating in a vacuum. They trusted our system more than they trusted their caregiver human to log their contributions and communicate updates.

This is kind of a big deal. Well, it might be kind of a huge deal. CareWell will always manage the tasks of caregiving, but it may center around something else. We’re considering the idea that CareWell isn’t task management as much as help management. CareWell may be a digital prosthesis for those who have trouble asking for and receiving help.

This new direction / refinement will require more research, and I’ll feel a lot better writing blogs on pilot results when we are generating consistent results instead of new directions. Eric and I have to talk more about all of this, but to me the concept is getting clearer and more exciting.

The post Finessing the Help Dance appeared first on Austin Center for Design.

Ask Will Mederski and me what we did in school, and our answer is “A lot!”

We’ve designed a service to combat “Nothing” and help parents discuss school at home with their kids. Our goal is to extend the classroom experience into the home by giving parents the necessary information to have insightful conversations with their children. Our service, BringUp will automatically send parents a SMS text message each evening with that day’s classroom highlights and talking points. While many other teacher to parent text messaging services are available, BringUp is the only one which allows teachers to input their lesson plans ahead of time and then delivers them when parents are with their children.

While we spent 6 months formally learning design, the past 6 weeks have been a crash course in entrepreneurship.  I’m personally accustomed to pitching and selling ideas from my industry experience, but speaking to potential customers about a product which doesn’t yet exist is difficult. From my point of view, there’s a fine line between delivering a weak message, and being overconfident.  Much like designers must know their customer’s expectations, entrepreneurs must understand the expectations from everyone they meet with. (Customers, partners, advisors, funders etc.)

One part of our experience, which is most likely unique from the rest of the AC4D companies, is that we had the opportunity to form a partnership with an existing company before we even started software development. These discussions felt different that other partnership meetings I’ve had, but I initially couldn’t figure out why. After the 2^nd meeting I realized that it was because Will and I had complete control over making decisions for BringUp, which is a pretty powerful (and scary) feeling. We’re not making decisions on behalf of our other companies, or bosses. We’re doing it for ourselves, and BringUp. Cool.

Will and I want BringUp to be used in schools. We believe that BringUp really can help drive student engagement and allow parents to get into a habit of talking about school with their children daily.  Whether or not Will and I build BringUp as a standalone product, or sell the design to another education company, we want it to be used.

www.bringuptogether.com

The post What did you do in school this year? appeared first on Austin Center for Design.

Currently, adoption paperwork is agency-specific, analog and a complete pain. Documents are scanned, mailed, faxed, lost, forgotten and never in the right place. Adoptive parents are burdened by lugging heavy stacks of paperwork to places like the DMV, airports, or even on a roadtrip. Take a look at the image of a users’ to-do list below. He and his partner re-write this list each morning. As you can see, four out of the five tasks relate to paperwork management.

Here are the two big questions put to the test of our pilot: do people feel secure managing personal documents online and is there something comforting about physical paper that adopting parents wouldn’t want to give up?

First: security. When we asked users if they already house secure documents online they at first said no then realized that they are emailing not secured PDF’s on their smart phones daily. The iOS app, as it’s currently envisioned, will have the most recent and up to date security measures.

Second: validity of digital paperwork. The answer here, according to the adoption lawyer we spoke with, is a bit more complicated. There are certain documents demanded in original, notarized form by the courts. There are other documents that are often shared in scanned form. The new politics brought to question by developing technology are still clearing these waters. (For instance, did you know there are now online notaries?) The person who brings this app to life, (see below), will have to keep their fingers to this pulse.

The professional team behind Adapt Solutions is myself, Melissa Chapman, and William Morgan. I’m leading the business and brand development (crafting the narrative, reaching out to pilot participants and community leaders) and Willy is lead on design (in charge of the interaction design, graphics and usability). Over the course of the last 4 weeks we have piloted with 13 users including adoption lawyers, redesigned the entire application 5 times, and presented progress in a client-like setting each week.

Our goal is a clean user interface with basic document sharing functionality. See the latest homescreen below.

We have learned a lot in terms of discipline, working fast, iterating like hell, and the importance of staying flexible.

The biggest takeaway, however, is validation of this need-based technology. * It’s known around these parts that Willy nor I plan to launch this as a business. There have been times, however, where we meet eyes and realize the reality: nobody is doing this and everybody needs this.

That leaves us with an overwhelmingly strong feeling to give this to someone who will bring it to fruition.

The post Adapt Solutions: An Update appeared first on Austin Center for Design.

This past week, we began piloting, with Chuck and I as the system.   Why pilot you may ask?  To make sure we get the system interaction right.  And in a very cost effective and fun manner, we learned a lot about how to improve the initial interaction model.  Six actual caregivers posing as care helpers received texts regarding activity “asks” such as taking Grandma to PT, visiting, or buying her a sweater.  They then had to respond “y” or “n” and could check task details by following a link to a hosted image page of the fake task.  After accepting (or declining), we sent confirmation texts 24 hours in advance of the supposed task due date to reconfirm their commitment.  The day after, we sent texts asking for updates that would be posted to the system for all to see (imagining use of the actual app by a core team of helpers).

For one, we learned that we will need to plan for uncertainly – helpers will invariably want more information, and there has to be a text option for “?”, at this point, which will likely direct a text to the primary caregiver to determine how to answer.

The goal is to take as much of the matching and explanation responsibility OFF the caregiver, which we intend to do through smart hints when creating tasks, and well as a redesigned message that may include key components of the task in addition to the name.

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DESIGN RESEARCH: FINDING INNOVATION
Market research attempts to understand purchasing behavior of a small sample, in order to predict purchasing behavior of a big sample. Design research attempts to empathize with a small group, in order to identify opportunities for design-led innovation. It’s a strategic driver for new product and service functionality.

DESIGN ACROSS TIME
Service design considers how people change over time, and how products can evolve to meet their changing needs. It considers the multiple touchpoints people have with products as multiple opportunities to create engaging interactions, and treats people as co-creators of experience.

NARRATIVE AND STORYTELLING
Technological advancement has allowed even “non-creative” people to tell their story in a way that’s meaningful and engaging. Through rich video, the nostalgia of audio, and simple creative tools, people can claim control over the way they are perceived and represented in online, social media.

You can see some great pictures of the event below. Thanks to Kim Foster for her photography, and to Stubbs for some great food!

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