hey guys!
soooo I was just reading through the New York Times’ Ninth Annual Year in Ideas… when I came across our very own Professor Berger!
Thought you might like to read the entry
I for one will be bugging him for the rest of the writing on the subject. 
cheers,
Ariana
So, here we are again. This time for the last time.
I will be presenting my prototypes in class, but here I wanted to share screenshots all three prototypes, and elaborate on what could be expanded upon, elaborate any ideas I had that I didn’t have the skillset to render in the prototype, and elaborate other thoughts I had along the way.
So, first off… I’m still super slow at this. I set out to do a simple mapping… and getting all the links working all the time takes me three hours. I hope that I get better at doing all the adding links… because otherwise I for health reasons should not go near code. I stay up all night.
That said, this has been great because I can tangibly track how I’m doing.
Prototype 1: the Household help
This is the practical application, meant to ease up tracking and dealing out responsibilities around the house.
check out my presentation of that day:
It includes the rough process of creating the app.
and here a screen shot: (lick for link to actual app)
Prototype 2: the abstract one
My POV: Joey is looking for a new job, and had heard at one of the numerous family reunions about a second uncle that had been involved in the sector he is interested in, health care reform. He would like a better way to maneuver the family history and family connections in order to figure out who best to ask.
nothing much more to add, I’m afraid. Other than that apparently there’s a website out there somewhere that does exactly this– the person that told me about it, however, couldn’t remember what its URL was. Oh well– for now, I do think it’d be a great tool for a college-age kid. The only issue is gathering all the data of the profiles of contacts (at the moment, the idea is it would link to that person’s linkedin profile).
my app: FAMILY CONNECTIONS
Prototype 3: the futuristic one
the process for this one was similar to when I was brainstorming/saturating myself for the household app. I listened around for the topics that came up most when speaking of people’s relatives that lived in different cities/states/countries. And I realized one of the chief concerns was the well-being of these relatives.
My POV: Janie is really worried about her grandfather, because he is getting forgetful as his meds become increasingly complicated. At the same time, Timothy seems to be refusing to take his potassium pills, and she just doesn’t have time to look out every morning. She would like a way to be certain her family members are taking the medication they need.
this has become something I worked on in conjunction with a project for my ME101 class, Visual Thinking. For my 3rd Project in that class, I designed a pill container that can sense when a pill has been extracted and verify that it has been done so at the correct time. If the pill is not extracted within a (customizable) time-frame, an alert is sent out to a family member and/or a hospital database. The appeal is that this is a very unobtrusive/non-invasive way of keeping tabs on one’s relatives. Much of the time, people taking pills aren’t otherwise impaired. They still have their faculties, but are merely forgetful. This way it doesn’t seem like anyone’s impeding on the freedom of the relative in question.
The ‘alerts’ to the family member could show up on an app like this: MEDALERT
I also went ahead and finished my perceptions of time map:
Overall, I want to thank ALL of you guys for having made this course as interesting as it’s turned out to be. I’ve definitely just spent the entire night working out lasting bugs, but you know what? It’s been worth it. I’ve had so much fun showing everyone I run into my prototypes…
Cheers,
Ariana Koblitz
