tash wong projects

I like to make things that bring people together in new ways. Here you'll find projects from my past - some from my time at SVA IxD and a few professional projects from before. I'm interested in how shifts in social, technological, and economic structures are changing all kinds of things. I'm currently questioning the nature of work and what it mean to turn our passions into our livelihoods through: Coastermatic Coastermatic prints Instagram images to stone coasters to help people make beautiful + functional conversation pieces for their homes. Think Bigger, Make Better TBMB is the result of my masters thesis at SVA IxD. It is a conversational framework designed to help you articulate your ideas and perspectives with others. I currently live in San Francisco.

[tashwong-portfolio]

Coastermatic Chief Coaster Officer Your instagrams on stone coasters. Ongoing 

My current role involves everything from Product Strategy, UI design, Front and Backend code, to Marketing, Customer Support and Business Development. Coastermatic began as a collaboration with Tom Harman, as part of Gary Chou's Entrepreneurial Design class. 

Videos

Coastermatic is a friendly Instagram to coaster service that's been designed to help you get your stories out of your phone on the table. Literally.



By combining the power of personal photography, granted by Instagam, with our belief that physical possessions should be more expressive of the people that use them, we’ve succeeded in bringing thousands of conversation starting coaster sets to tables across the globe.



Coastermatic began in the spring of 2012 and is run by Tash Wong, an interaction designer with an architectural history. 

[tashwong-portfolio]

Weather Light Physical computing April 2012 

This project was a 6-week collaboration with Tom Harman for Rob Faludi‘s Physical Computing class.

Videos: User Journey, User Research, and Startup Sequence

Weather Light is a prototype for an object that lives in the home, shedding light on what you need to take with you when you leave.

The project began as an exploration into how people behave when lighting responds to their movement in a space. After various non-utilitarian experiments the project naturally evolved into something with a more functional form. The final prototype provides today’s weather where you need it most, next to your front door.

Weather Light connects to the Internet, giving you up to the minute weather information. Users can change the time period they’re viewing using a dial on the side, showing the weather up to 10 hours from now (the length of a typical work day + commute time). 3 x RGB LEDs change color to indicate the temperature outside while the cardboard symbol reflects the weather conditions.

Early iterations included a motion sensor which switched the box from passive to active mode i.e. it was purely an ambient light until someone approached the front door when it would notify you of what conditions to expect.

[tashwong-portfolio]

Section Story Integrated digital and environmental experience Jan - Feb 2012

This project was a 6 week collaboration with Prachi Pundeer and Shanshan Gao. It was completed for Jill Nussbaum's Design in Public Spaces class. My role included concept development, story boarding, art direction, and presentation design. 

Until 2001, Fresh Kills, located on Staten Island, was the world's largest landfill. By 2030, after extensive rejuvenation, it will be one of NYC's largest parks. The problem? Very few New Yorkers know it exists and those who do are concerned with its past-life. My group carried out research, speaking to members of the public as well as Carrie Grassi, Land Use and Outreach Manager for Freshkills Park, to establish the most effective way to communicate the complex story to the public.

Our concept uses environmental graphics and video installations to convert unassuming NY subway stations into 3-month exhibition spaces. Here, escalator walls are used to display layers of graphics, which represent a section-cut of the site evolving from landfill to park. Above ground, commuters encounter an installation of native plants and a series of birdhouses, each displaying a video feed of birds in the park.

Section Story is currently being considered by the NYC Parks Department as a possible means of promoting Fresh Kills Park. 

[tashwong-portfolio]

Caption Concept and Design for iPad app November 2011 

This project was a collaboration with Barbara deWilde and Prachi Pundeer for Carla Diana's Fundamentals of Interaction Design class. My roles included concept ideation, userflow illustration.

Caption is a response to a design challenge to create a product or service that meets an unmet need around the management of time. 

Challenge

We point our camera and take a picture, capturing a moment in time. Not long ago, film encouraged us to carefully edit our photos, and the time and money invested the photographic process drove many to organize them into albums and elucidate them with details.

In recent years, photography has undergone a momentous shift. The ability to capture an image has been made effortless. Afterwards, however, these images pile up in digital weigh stations, such as iPhoto, Facebook, and in our cameras. While this has made everyday photography a ubiquitous part of daily life, the ability to add context and value to these captured moments has not kept pace. In what way can this be solved?

Approach

We conducted a number of explorations to help design a solution.Informal interviews and conversations about annotation helped us find what information people were interested in having stored with their photos. 

Information such as:

date

place

description

personal message or drawing for someone

people in the photo

the photographer

the location/altitude (on top of the Empire state, below the ocean)

weather

facts about the location

We also worked through various user scenarios to help us understand the types of context an application could be used in, and what information would be relevant. 

Outcome

Caption will give a photograph, a personal moment in time, a wider context. Through combining data from various public and private sources with the time and location information stored with each photo, we can tell a more detailed story of what happened on the day for the photographer and in the world at large. 

This data is joined with the photo to give it a virtual ‘back’ where information such as the weather, local and international headlines, chart topping song, NPR’s story of the day, or any other relevant stories is stored. Our goal is to avoid the cold impersonal list of existing digital photo albums, and develop a design that conveys and gives weight to the warmth and the personal stories photographs hold.

[tashwong-portfolio]

Sound Sketches Video exploration into sound in the city February 2012 

This project was a collaboration with Tom Harman, and was completed for Clay Wiedemann's section of MFA IxD's Prototyping class. My role included storyboarding, copy writing, and amazing acting. 

A series of video explorations in response to the question:

"If we knew more about the sounds around us, could it enhance our experience of the city?"

Sketch 1: Change the levels Headphones that turn down street noise, to help the sounds of the world reach us clearly.

Sketch 2: Noise map  A map showing noise levels around the city. Used here to find a quiet place to make a phone call.

Sketch 3: Context layer Sound layered at specific locations to provide cultural context to local landmarks.

[tashwong-portfolio]

Take Note Concept and design for mobile app December 2011

Demo Site Best viewed on iPhone 4 and above

Take Note is an app created to encourage active exploration of the city. Designed for those occasional spare moments out and a about, Take Note gives you a short set of directions and prompts you to reflect on your destination. These reflections can be captured in three ways: taking a photo, recording audio, or writing a brief note. Each of these options are intended to put a slightly different focus on the environment around you, effectively 'tinting' your perception. Later, these notes can be explored through the archive and shared. The archive gathers together notes taken in the same place and displays the date, time, and location of recording. 

This was an 8 week solo project completed for Jason Santa Maria's Craft and Communication Class. 

[tashwong-portfolio]

Taste Home A service to help you find the taste of home in NYC October 2011 

This project was a 3 week collaboration with Guri Venstad, and part of Jason Santa Maria's MFA IxD class, Craft and Communications. My role included interface design, concept ideation, and front-end development.

Demo Site

Taste Home is a website that pulls together familiar foods organized by country, giving those who aren’t native to NYC a place to find something familiar to them. Our prototype uses photography as the primary visual element and contains a few Norweigian entries. 

For this project, the task was to concept and prototype a way to improve a particular behavior around finding things. My partner, Guri Venstad (from Norway), and I (kind of from New Zealand) chose to investigate finding international foods in NYC. We found a couple of interesting things:

1. It can be really hard to find food from your home country.

2. Through food, people are actually looking to find and connect with something familiar. 

“Eating RJs black licorice logs makes me think of sitting on my mum’s porch in the sun; having an idle chat with a cup of tea.” - Rachel Liebert, New Zealander

Reflecting on our own experience and talking to a lot of other NYC imports, we came to the conclusion that food particular to your home country allows you to feel a sense of connection to a part of your past and a part of your identity. Taste Home is an exploration of a way to bring these things closer together.

[tashwong-portfolio]

Light Work Sound Visualization December 2011

Video

Light Work is a sound visualization piece created to explore code as a medium for creative work. 

Using Processing and the Mimin sound library, a small violin sample is used to experiment with ways sound can be transformed into shape and color. Circles appear on screen as the sample plays, the intensity of the sound determines the transparency of each circle's fill. A range of controls allow the operator to change the size and the shade of the circles as they are created. 

This was a 6 week solo project for Amit Pitaru's Slow Code class.

[tashwong-portfolio]

Growing Up A multimedia service that makes it easy for parents to save the stories of their children. November 2011 

This project was a 3 week collaboration with Sarah Adams and Tom Harman for Jason Santa Maria's class, Craft and Communications. My role included concept ideation, copy writing, wire-framing, and front-end development.

Video Demo Site

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?

[tashwong-portfolio]

Betterment Product Strategy and User Experience August - September 2011

Betterment is a personal investment service focused on making investing simpler and smarter.

Up until Sept of 2011, Betterment's application allowed the creation of only one account or 'goal' per user. In response to user requests to segment money in more ways, Betterment asked me to help them add the ability to create 'multiple goals' within their application. This required rethinking the way user accounts were set up, figuring out elegant ways to work within FDIC regulations, and creating new interfaces to support the new feature. 

My approach began with mapping out the structure of their application in its single account state. The resulting document set provided a solid starting point for conversations with all stake holders, from the CEO to the dev team.

From there I created product flows integrating new features and updated the interfaces for all affected parts of the application.

The 'Multiple-Goals' feature was presented at Finovate 2011 and can be seen in action here (from 1:50).

[tashwong-portfolio]

Open Hospitality Product Strategy and User Experience 2009 - 2011

Open Hospitality, now a subsidiary of Pegasus Solutions, provides web strategy services exclusively to the hotel community.

Throughout my 2 years with Open Hospitality I worked on a variety of projects with a gifted team of developers led by Steve Gravitz.  

The highlight of my time there was the creation of a responsive mobile framework that allowed hotels to leverage existing content, such as room descriptions and room rates, and display it in a mobile and tablet friendly form. The product is now sold under the name OpenFlex by Pegasus Solutions and is used by hotels worldwide. 

As the product lead, my responsibilities on the project included:

Analysis of existing products

Interface design

User testing

Front end development

Integration with Open Hospitality's code base

Integration with Open Hospitality's Admin system

Workflow and documentation to coordinate roll out of hotel mobile sites between for front end, design, and customer support teams

[tashwong-portfolio]

Georgia Retail Design Jan - July 2008

Georgia is a Soho based beauty shop specializing in products for all hair types.

This project was a collaboration with Christian Wassmann and Pino Pavese. My role included concept modeling, photoshop rendering, detail and construction drawings, and construction management.

A T-shaped space on Houston Street is transformed into a beauty store and salon that specializes in curly hair. The basic idea was to open up the old storefront and enhance the character of the space by adding a few elements such as feminine curves in dialogue with straight glass and mirrors.

A salvaged wooden door is inserted in an otherwise all-glass facade. Most of the time this door is open and an inlaid mirror reflects a slightly distorted image of the passer-bys walking from Elizabeth Street to The Bowery. Freestanding round display units invite the customers to meander around in a manner similar to hair curving around curlers. More products and a hair salon are located on wavy and staggered shelves along the back wall of the store. A room-high mirror creates the illusion of five large windows instead of only three and hides a small office and storage area. A black heart houses a comfortable chaise lounge and the shampoo sink.