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Week 9

Written by Kenneth on April 20, 2013.

As we discussed in the previous blog post, we decided to elaborate on the 3 concepts and outline the pros and cons. The ideas changed from their 'original' concepts the more we discussed.

'Simile' was envisioned as a virtual 3d space that lets you explore your family members in a way similar to the game mechanics in 'The Sims' or 'Farmville'. The aim is to learn things by playing. It would be specifically designed for kids in the 'tween'(9-12) years. The Quests would be based on real life events based on social network. Periodically at different levels, you would be introduced to different family members who would give you certain tasks or help you get things done. This would thus help connect distributed nuclear families to create a psuedo joint family.

A Nice Idea but.. The space would need to customized according to each family. It was hard to make relevant engaging tasks and including memories about relatives seemed forceful. Speaking with a game designer friend, Yadu, we were told that introducing family members as fictional characters may distort their perception in the kid.

'Treasure Text' was about having that one daily prompt and notification to convey stories/memories. We proposed that it would be cross platform from the web to the simple sms enabled cell phone. The prompts would be based on themes like people, event and object. Thus it would help connect people not yet online and would help you build and maintain a family tree.

A Nice Idea but.. Maintaining the same level of content across platforms would be hard. Photos and videos would not be accessible through sms enabled phones unless with an attached link. This seemed too forceful and exclusive. Further, the aggregated family data could only be accessed via the web interface. Our friends today are more important than some of our relatives, wouldnt we want to add them to this network? There did not seem to be any motivation for someone to add content to this system, leading to leeches in the system.

'Gistify' seemed the most 'straight forward' idea. It basically aggregated content from our network in various forms in order to create a sort of database of content. This was specific for each day, like sending it into a vault with features to get back content as specific periods of time or with options to collate the content into an embeddable form.

A Nice Idea but.. We were not sure how motivated users were to be able to keep contributing on a daily basis. Extracting data from their social media profiles made things easier for us, but we still lost a lot of memories which are not 'web' based.

We debated amongst ourselves and decided that the core ideas in 'Simile', 'Treasure Text' and 'Gistify' would be what we would want to explore more.

Week 8

Written by Kenneth on April 9, 2013.

Based on the feedback from Lync meeting, we explored various concepts. This exercise was used to mainly allow us to decide upon the directions that we intend to take next.

First we built a parody concept, Family-book, which was an overgrown social network. It solved the problem (of archiving & retrieving memories) but was not an elegant way of solving it. The world does not need just another social network. It was a reminder that we should not end up with a product like this.

We decided to take a core point and build a concept around it. We thought of the concept of teaching values and traditions to the younger generation. Hence a game, "Simile" was born, targeted at tweens, to help learn by playing.

Next came a concept of 'Yaadein' which was built around the fact that people like to reminisce during their leisure time and this tool would enable them to access their digital memories when sitting in the comfort of their couch. This included aspects like Summary of important memories, huge display (on a wall? big screen?), immersive interactions etc.

'Objectify' was a concept which dealt with collecting the digital memories in physical objects and helping people reminisce better when they come across objects like showpieces or physical invites. Memories could be added regularly to objects, or shared across various objects.

'Treasure Text' was a simple concept about receiving and adding a memory a day into a system which would use it to build a bigger picture using prompts. Restricting it to only one memory would make it an easy task to add memories, and making it daily would make it like a ritual.

We also dabbled with a life-logging concept called 'Gistify' which was meant for storytelling about the Indian family functions like marriages, births, etc. in a collaboratively.

We debated amongst ourselves and decided that the core ideas in 'Simile', 'Treasure Text' and 'Gistify' would be what we would want to explore more.

Week 7

Written by Kenneth on April 3, 2013.

Post the juries, we got back to our research. We looked at startups and companies in the same space. We came across 'The Indian Memory Project' by a NID alumnus, Anusha Yadav, which chose to depict the collective history of India through media like photographs, postcards. We also came across a study by the University of Portsmouth about how 'Looking at pictures of yourself can make you happy'. A little narcissist maybe but it has its roots in reminiscent therapy.

Easter came and Kenneth had to go home. The rest of the team did a bit of user research by visiting people in their home, talking about families, photographs & sharing memories. We also observed how they use photographs & objects to recollect old memories.

We had the presentation with Nithin Ismail, Justin George & Deepak Menon from Microsoft on April 2nd. The presentation was made via Lync (online) and we were told that it’s time to start building a model and finalize on a concept.

Week 6

Written by Kenneth on March 24, 2013.

The Jury week was approaching and we were busy with the pre-jury preparation. We had to present our project at its current state to the panel and we had to accumulate all the work since the first pitch and make it presentable. March 22 was the jury when we presented our work so far and the panel was quite happy with the idea and the process that we were following. They ended up recommending us some reading and one of the judges actually summarized our idea as 'Family as a collective memory'.

Week 5

Written by Kenneth on March 14, 2013.

As part of our user research we started the interviews, talking to people about family and other cultural aspects around which the whole system revolves. What are their daily activities and how they balance their work-home life. We talked to them about their experience/understanding about families(joint/nuclear) and relatives. Here are some of the responses that we got:

“First of things have special memories.”
— Consultant (50 years old), preserves memories using photographs.
“Had it not been for a family, I might not have believed in spirituality.”
—Income Tax Officer (42 years old), maintains a family tree
“Joint family may seem like a bad option but its not.”
— Homemaker (35 years old), quit work when son was born
“I want my kid to have his own experiences and learn from them. I want to guide him and not take his decisions for him.”
— Software Engineer (31 years old), leaves kid at daycare when at work
“Too much togetherness is not good. I have relatives I can’t relate to.”
— Student (24 years old), part of joint family

Week 4

Written by Kenneth on March 6, 2013.

Week 4 was spent with us doing both literature review as well as preliminary user research via personal & telephonic interviews. We found several examples of family tree applications, but none seemed to focus on preserving culture, and heritage. We also spent time with Prof. Vinod Vidwans, who helped us think beyond current technologies and brainstorm on futuristic ideas. It helped us to come out of a narrow mindset and gave us a new direction!

Some of the ideas discussed (Futuristic, impossible to implement) were:

  • Wearable Memories: Clothes that record memories. Dresses worn on special events like Anniversaries store special memories
  • Holograms for connecting with (geographically) distant family members
  • Objects in public spaces that record memories, and allow you to recap them whenever you visit them next
  • Cubes for preserving languages and teaching them to next generations
  • A box of memories: Like the heirlooms passed on from one generation to another

The last idea appealed to us more, and we decided to spend more time exploring this idea.

The week ended with the three of us attending the Global Service Jam (Bangalore).

Week 3

Written by Kenneth on February 25, 2013.

Week 3 was mostly spent with us trying to come up with a brief and juggle other assignments.

Lot of preliminary research and mind mapping was done so that we could narrow down our topic slightly.

We gave our pitch to Mr. Nithin Ismail from Microsoft. His feedback was mostly positive, and he also emphasized on not narrowing our ideas based on the final outcome. He wanted to ensure that we don't just restrict to the stories aspect.

Now that our idea has some kind of validation, we began to chart out a plan to execute the research.

Week 1 & 2

Written by Kenneth on February 18, 2013.

Week 1 actually started when we were given the brief. We were not really sure how we would merge it into this semester's Design Project theme 'Culture and Communication'.

The team sat and brainstormed ideas which would use the attributes of both big data and culture.

We spent the first week exploring two themes: Energy conservation for modern homes & Persuasive design for preventing food wastage at cafeterias.

By the end of the first week, we weren't happy with the two ideas and decided to start afresh. We were clear about one thing though, as this project was spread over a longer duration than normal we wanted to follow a proper design process. We were also trying hard to not get narrowed down with the final outcome. We didn't want to just build another app!

As we brainstormed, we kept coming back to the concept of 'families' and 'stories'.

We decided to make this our central theme.