SVA IxD Thesis Blog of David Bellona

Documenting the raw and refined thought, research, and making of my thesis at SVA's IxD program.

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Verizon's Uppernet Cloud

Verizon is running a new commercial for their "Uppernet" service - pitching themselves against Amazon Web Services, Akamai, and other cloud computing enterprise solutions. What is simply awesome about the commercial (not the service) is that it touts how physical Verizon's cloud is compared to its' competitors.

Our cloud is not soft and fluffy. Our cloud is made of bedrock, concrete, and steel.

Reads like a truck ad.

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Canary has taken flight

Introducing Canary: a mobile application that tracks and offsets your digital carbon footprint. Visit canaryinthecloud.com for more information.

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Watch our live presentations, May 12th.

Watch my classmates and I present our thesis work live at the SVA Theatre in New York City, 11am-4pm on May 12th. 

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This weekend I got some help from Sara Dierck and Tash Wong making the packaging for the SVA IxD Festival and Exhibition takeaways: test tubes. Instead of describing the carbon footprint of our data in terms of weight (pounds or grams), I'm using volume and using empty test tubes to communicate the concept. For example, Google estimated that a search produces 0.2 grams of CO2 which is equal to approximately 100mL - weight of air versus volume of air. By comparison, a resting human breath on average is 500mL or five Google searches.

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My process book is now available for digital reading and hard copies will be arriving soon. While I am still working on my thesis deliverables (this being one of them) and final presenation, I pulled another all-nighter with fellow classmate and taxi buddy Chris Cannon to finish up the content/layout for my process book and send it to Blurb for publishing. My goal was to get it ready for our exhibition on May 12th so I had to put content on lock down, even though coversations and work today has already rendered my book outdated. Oh, c'est la thesis.

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Just finished designs for Canary: an iPhone app that tracks your digital content production and subsequent CO2 emissions. First flight is May 12, 2012.

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I've been working on designing Canary's iPhone app screens. Here's a sneak peek of the offset screen for Instagram, displaying current and previous offsets with options to pay an offset immediately or setup a monthly autopay. I decided that every 100 grams of CO2 emissions would equal $0.10. For user uploading 50-60 pictures a month, he/she would have the option of paying $1.02 to a local carbon offset project for the month's CO2 emissions.

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Companies must look not only at how efficiently they are consuming electricity, but also the sources of electricity that they are choosing.

Greenpeace. Read the full report

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The process of my process

I've reached a critical crossroads in my thesis work: the point at which this process blog, my final documentation (process book), and work on the Canary project are nearly parallel. I have three weeks left to finish multiple deliverables and time management now trumps any and all decisions. As a result, this will be the second to last entry of my thesis blog. My final entry will be a link to the live stream of our final presentations on May 12th.

For the remaining time, I will be preparing:

Process Book - The keystone deliverable and documentation of all my work over the last year. I've completed nearly 2/3 of it and have to tighten up content as well as references/spelling, nevermind the documentation of the final project - Canary. The process book will also be the basis of my thesis defense presentation on April 25th.

Canary - I just finished my wireframes for the app (see below for details). I outlined my video and have identified five core user flows and screens to design. There still maybe time to revise my wireflows I created a few days ago, but this will be one of those "nice to haves". Additionally, I must design and animate the key flows/screens to repurpose for the video, canary website, and final presentation.

Final Presentation - I outlined a draft version (v.2.0) of my final presentation, and will be presenting this version to my classmates on this Wednesday, April 18th.

Thesis Exhibition - Immediately following our presentations at the SVA Theatre, we have a reception and exhibtion of our thesis work back at our studio. I outlined a sketch for the setup and talked takeaways with my cousin Sara who will be helping me out with design/production.

Over this past week, I'm up to three cups o' coffee (sometimes four) and wireframing/prototyping the Canary app. With a little help from my classmates, I quickly learned two awesome rapid prototyping tools for the iPhone: TAP and LiveView. Seriously, these are my new favorite applications. Using these new tools, I created some key screens, killed a few, modified others, and got ready for my a review with Mari Sheibley, lead design at Foursquare (thanks to Michael Yap for setting it up). The review went awesome and Mari gave me some super valuable feedback. Soon after, I met with Cooper to discuss our wireframes, stripping out features and complexity. After a solid weekend of work and a visit to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, I shored my wireframes and prepped for final designs.

Before my review with Mari, I met with Liz to discuss the status and approach of my process book and takeaways for the thesis exhibition. I left the meeting feeling engerized and subsequently pulled an all nighter working on my process book. It felt great to check a few items off the deliverables list as well as work alongside a fellow IxD'ers late night in the studio.

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Moving from concept map to wireframing, there seemed to gap in process. Cooper, Sera, and I have been disussing various mobile UI patterns for the iPhone (navigation styles, actions, pages, and sorting structures) and different techniques of wireframing/prototyping - figuring out a few approaches to fill this gap. For me, a wire flow exercise seemed to do the trick.

Above is a snippet of wire flows for the Canary iPhone app: high-level wireframes outlining overall structure, global functions, key features based on my concept map, and user flows for common tasks. The intention is for these wire flows to inform my wireframes, which I'll be working on and prototyping over the next 3 days. View the all the wire flows in poster format.

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I just finished a concept map/feature set model of my service, Canary. Above is the full system model, outlining the core interaction and four key features of the app. View the booklet that breaks down the different actors, key actions, and features.

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The Coal Button site is now live. Just remember: behind every click, there's a little lump of coal.

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A Trip to Central (Way Upstate) New York

It's currently day 3 of my visit to my parent's home in good ol' Oneida County. I consider the opportunity visit one filled with home cooked meals, sleeping beyond the usual 6 hours per night, and of course, gettin' work done.

One checklist item is finding a way to communicate the relatable measures of carbon dioxide. Simply using 'pounds of' or 'grams of' can work when talking big numbers. For example: "In 2010, the world's data centers produced a whopping 130 million tons of CO2 emissions." Upon first listen, a huge number like that can be shocking. However, the effect can soon wear off quickly, leaving us to ask, "Ok, that is a lot of CO2, but what does that actually mean and just what is a ton of CO2 really?" Well, I think I've found a solution and been spending the better part of my Saturday and Sunday prepping and painting it. (many thanks to Cooper, Liz, and my parents for discussion and manual labor)

The solution, which I'll keep in the ol' hopper until April 25th (thesis defense), is part of a larger strategy to communicate my thesis within 7 minutes. In that time, I need educate and relate the topic of my research - cloud-based computing and the environment - to my audience along with my proposed product. My larger strategy is inspired by Charles and Ray Eames' Powers of Ten which communicates incomprehensible scale beautifully. While I'm developing a narrative to present my thesis, I've been outlining the features I wish to highlight of my recently branded product, Canary.

Having multiple meetings with Cooper, Sera, and a few first-years, I came away with a few great ideas to guide my branding process, namely (pun intended): including the word of what is being measured, bytes; using action words; and playing with encouraging words of creation, more specifically around Nike Fuel's efforts eg: Nike Fuel is to Calories what (my product) is to Bytes. Despite our efforts, I was still stuck. Then, I remembered something Cooper wrote down on a whiteboard a few weeks ago, "service as sensor". After an inspired breakfast in the park, out came Canary - the original gas sensor.

Some classmates of mine warned me that the name did have some negative implications and was a bit dramatic. But Michael Yap encouraged me to redefine old words with updated definitions for modern times, stating "Words are containers: you can empty existing meanings and fill them with new ones."

With a name under my belt and branding sketches drawn on my train ride heading upstate, I sketched out concept maps for both the problem space as well as the Canary product. This laid the groundwork for my current workload: finalizing features and wireframe development. Taking a peek at my schedule of deliverables, I will spend the next 4 days flushing out user flows and wireframes while developing the website shell for my product launch. This development work (which by the way I'm starting to love front-end coding again, HT to Zeldman, Jason Santa Maria, and schoolmates) is also part of another project I'm about to launch, The Coal Button.

Making, outlining, refining, programming, designing, and writing has been the sum of my last two weeks on thesis roller coaster. It's really, really fun right now and tomorrow, another train ride back to the city and school.

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I'm testing out my assumptions for two potential features in my final product with the Carry Your Cloud prototype. For the last 5 days, I asked a few participants to either: carry around a physical representation of their tweets (I've been carrying around all my my Flickr photos) or carry a "wallet" with tweet coins to cash in each time they tweet. As users of cloud-based services, I want to know how aware we are of amassed data that we now store in our digital attics (aka tweets from 2 years ago, forgotten and in the cloud). I also want to test the concept of placing limits on an unlimited resource and understanding our digital activity as currency.

This week, I'll be collecting the journals of participants, conducting exit interviews, and do some sythesizing with my proposed feature set.

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User Stories Triptych: Weekly Roundup for Thesis.

Saturday, 3/10

Came into the studio early to update the lego dashboards for Emission Bricks prototype, running low on Foursquare and carbon bricks. Actually, ran out of a few larger bricks for carbon, and had to use the Flickr bricks (grey) instead. Started to sketch/storyboard video for product which led to thinking about the form of my process book; I've been debating website vs. book so I talked with my classmate Erin and alumnus Jeff Kirsch about medium. Settled on a book that can be printed on blurb (ht Russ M.) or exist as a printout or pdf. On my way home, I outlined a potential narrative for my final presentation.

Sunday, 3/11

Got up early to do some laundry and generate user stories on note cards to outline potential features for my product. Also, came up with 'Cumulus Alpha' as an FPO name. (naming jam session with my classmate Sera Koo happening on 3/18) Spent most of the day designing and prepping Carry Your Cloud prototype project. Will be sending out twitter currency packs and bundles to participants in WI, OH, and RI. Before I left studio for the night/early morning, did a final update of the lego dashboards and setting up exit interviews for the Emission Bricks prototype project.

Monday, 3/12

Met with my thesis advisor Roger Mader for breakfast at our usual spot on Chambers St. We talked about ways to frame the narrative of my final presentation, namely on the disconnect we have with intangible and long term effects. Problem: we're not cognizant of our resource use or the consequences. If we can't see it, we can't see the depletion or ill-effects. As Roger said, the "feedback loop is slow so that the feedback is not felt until the next generation." I mailed out the Carry Your Cloud prototypes after breakfast. Started work on my process book layout and scanning items.

Tuesday, 3/13

Met with first-year IxD'er Tom Harman at a diner on 7th to document my experience with the Carry Your Cloud prototype. I'm carrying around all 1,538 photos from my Flickr account, dating back to July 2006 (weighs 11 lbs). Back at studio, shot an intro and 75% with a stop-motion video documentary on the Emission Bricks prototype, need to summarize my findings to complete the remaining 25%. Sent out instructions for the other participants involved in the Carry Your Cloud prototype. Sketched out potential interface and a feature flow for Cumulus Alpha product. More stop-motion editing, left studio late with classmate Chris Cannon which meant we cabbed it back to Brooklyn (win).

Wednesday, 3/14

Conducted a few exit interviews for Emission Bricks, more video edits. We had group roundtable review session for our prototypes with Frank Chimero, Amit Pitaru, and Paul Pangaro. All went well, especially with Paul, was super psyched about the experience and feedback. Also, trying different narratives for framing my project, got a lot better at it with more clarity as I presented, noted what worked and what didn't (am baking it in). Took a nap (epic) and continued work on process book which is really helping me construct the narrative on presenting my work for our thesis festival.

Thursday, 3/15

More process book work. Met with "the band" (Cooper, Chris, and Tina) for two hours to review one another's work. Outlined Cumulus Alpha's features and got great feedback. Will be flushing those out more as I review my user story cards and brainstorm around 2-3 key feature with Cooper on Saturday, 3/17. Left the studio late night feeling like a million bucks and couldn't stop smiling. Wrote a post on the subway ride home.

Friday, 3/16

Had a great lunch with fellow IxD'ers at Pies n' Thighs in Williamsburg (so good). Amazing discussion around thesis, process, and next steps. Contacting a former student of mine for his photography skills to document earlier exploratory projects. Started to read Grouped by Paul Adams to inform product features. Writing a few blog posts (this one included for documentation). It's 6:45pm, time to go home.

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Socially setting defaults, examples?

Am listing out features for my product and testing out a few of them as physical prototypes. One feature is how to set levels of consumption/payment for new users, namely the default state. In my transcription from my interview with Stephan Von Muhlen of Brooklyn's Energy Hub, he noted, “One of the most powerful tools for behavior change are setting defaults”, echoing a takeaway in Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein.

After connecting via Facebook, a user's defaults could be based on their friends defaults for not only levels of consumption/payment, but frequency and channel of alerts from the product. Anyone know of examples from other products that do this?

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Process manifesto for now now, not now.

"Thesis is process", I've been told.

It is a process of exploring an idea thought about but previously uninvestigated. It is also a process leaving behind old ways – of thinking, of biases, of assumptions – every single day as I continue to make. School projects from semesters past feel outdated and distant, from 1,000 years ago; my work from before school, from beyond the Jurassic.

Through the process of thesis, I am discovering entirely new ways of doing things. These things are also changing and evolving for everyone: methods for research/sorting/searching, knowledge of behavior patterns, coding languages, and 'on-boarding' flows for apps (yes, even that). Everything is remixed, tested out, fails or succeeds, and we learn from the result. This cycle was once slow, but today even outpaces how we organize our generations. As Paul Ford writes, "there's now one [generation] every three or four years".

I discover all these things now now, not now, because now is in the past. What I carry with me now now are a set of frameworks and tools to filter, understand, play with, and evolve the stream of new things coming at me. Some methods feel outdated and arduous; personas, the punching bag of design jokes, were completed for my thesis 1.5 months ago. They worked then and aided my research until 1.3 months ago. At present, they merely serve as documentation that I did them, stepping stones in a process.

Why? From what I've gleaned from my subsequent research, those personas were created from a version of me that was more biased, less empathetic, and assumed too much. My "persistent approach to a consistent idea" has rendered my previous yet valid work old, when compared to the new work it arose from. It is an awesome process, changing how I approach, think, and act.

And that's why thesis is process, or at least my opinion for now now.