My name is
Jack Moffett. I am an Interaction Designer with over ten years of experience. According to
Herb Simon, that makes me an expert, so I must have something worth sharing. I have started this venture as an exercise to spur critical thinking about my chosen profession. I hope that others may find it thought provoking as well.
DesignAday will present a brief thought about Design every weekday.
As far as reasonably priced hotels go, I’ve been pleased with Hilton Garden Inn. I’ve been staying in one this week. I just happened to look at the small print at the bottom of the little folder containing my room key card. This is what it says:
“I have requested weekday delivery of USA TODAY. If refused, a credit of $0.75 will be applied to my account.” Please call the Front Desk or check here to refuse. ☐
(Please drop off during your stay)
I requested no such thing. I left the paper lying on the floor outside of my door every morning. Housekeeping brings it in, but I don’t touch it. I have no interest in reading it. I certainly didn’t request it, regardless of the quotation marks around this 6-point text that I only happened to notice by chance. Calling the front desk is hardly worth the 75 cents, but I’m going to do it anyway, just to make a point.
You can keep your paper, and you can keep your words out of my mouth!
I was invited to participate in an “innovation session” to help my local public library create a vision for a future in which access to physical books may not be its primary purpose. I wasn’t sure what to expect unit I found out that the guy running the session, Paul Gould, is a senior designer at Maya. That means, of course, that it was a well-facilitated brainstorming session with Post-It Notes, Sharpies, and strategically selected members of the community. At the end of the two hours, each participant gave an elevator pitch for one big idea they particularly identified with, explaining how it could be tested.
The idea I championed was a public(ized) studio. Let’s move public libraries from institutions of consumption to enablers of creation. Provide public studio spaces for audio recording, video production, painting, writing, etc. Provide the professional tools that the amateur wouldn’t otherwise have access to, but do it in a public forum. If a local band comes in to record a few original songs, library patrons can choose to listen in and observe the process. In fact, since the band books the space ahead of time, they let their fans know, and it becomes an event. The library benefits from exposure to new patrons, and the band may pick up new fans.
To give the concept a trial run, temporarily repurpose a space in the library as a recording studio. Bring in a recording engineer for a day and hold a recording studio open house. Allow any person or group to come in and record one song, poem, or other performance. Have a documentary film crew on hand to capture the event.
Granted, this idea has all kinds of logistical and monetary hurdles, but it was a fun vision to play out in my head. There is so much potential for astounding works of creativity when the tools that once belonged to the elite are made available to the masses.
Panera and Qdoba are my favorite fast-food franchises. I take advantage of each of their customer loyalty programs. Qdoba’s is very straight forward. I hand them my card at checkout and receive points for every purchase. Once I accumulate enough points, I get a free entrée. Panera’s is a little more nebulous. I hand them my card at checkout, so I assume they are tracking my purchases, but I don’t know exactly how they determine rewards. Seemingly at random, they add “surprises” to my card, which they tell me about when I check out. Sometimes it’s a free pastry, sometimes it’s a free beverage, and once or twice, I’ve been granted a free sandwich.
My birthday is coming up, and both restaurants acknowledged it with free food. Panera put a free pastry on my card, which seems the obvious thing to do. I got a Cobblestone, which I learned is 25% of my recommended daily caloric intake. It was delicious. Qdoba, however, did something rather odd. Instead of using the card, they sent me email with a link to a webpage containing a “buy one entrée, get one free” coupon. The page even limits the number of times you can view it to three in an attempt to avoid cheating. I don’t understand why they wouldn’t take advantage of the card system that’s already in place.
When I first signed up for an account with Citizen’s Bank, it was because they provided an interface with Quicken. They allowed Quicken to download my register and submit bills for payment. I’ve been with them now about ten years, but I will soon be closing my accounts.
I received a letter the other day with the ominous heading: “Important changes to your account”. They were letting me know that they would be initiating a $15 monthly maintenance fee if I maintained a combined balance less than $5,000. My balance has been a little low since our Disney vacation over the summer followed by the trip to Dublin in February. On top of that, they’re also adding a $3.95 monthly fee for online banking with Quicken or Microsoft Money.
So, I’m now researching the online banks that I’ve been hearing about. As it turns out, most of them offer free checking with bill pay, iApps, no minimum balance, free, nationwide ATM use, and in many cases, better interest rates. One of them even allows you to deposit checks by photographing them with your phone. What’s not to like? Once again, it appears that brick and mortar just can’t compete with online services.
So, If you have a recommendation, I’d love to hear it. Please relate your experiences in the comments.
The final project of my course last semester challenged the students to identify a social issue in their community and address it through the design of a product or service. One of the two project teams selected bullying as their issue. They interviewed middle school students and counselors as part of their research, learning about how bullying is currently handled in the schools.
Bullying is a misunderstood issue that negatively affects the behavior of most students, leading to poor performance and decreased self-esteem. We want to empower students to report, mediate or avert bullying in middle schools. Traditional anti-bullying programs are structured so that students must make a physical trip to a main office to report to an adult about bullying. Discovering that bullying often goes unreported because students are hesitant to make that trip or share their experiences with adults, we offer in our project a discreet means of reporting and a virtual peer support system for students who may be victims of bullying.
They designed and prototyped a web-based social network focused on peer-support, confidence building, and unintrusive monitoring by the counselor. The project schedule was only a few weeks, so the final deliverable was a presentation of their concept, but the team did go so far as to get feedback from the same faculty they had interviewed at the beginning. The response was favorable, and they had good suggestions for improving it.
My students decided to enter the project in the Design Ignites Change Idea Awards.
In each award cycle one award of $1,000 and up to two at $500 each will be given to innovative project ideas that have the ability to ignite positive social change. Projects will also be highlighted on the Design Ignites Change website and promoted through the program’s PR efforts.
You can read more about their project, named Be!, on the Design Ignites Change website.
I live on top of a hill—a rather large one—overlooking the Ohio River. We often have high winds, and as a result, I and my neighbors end up with a fair bit of trash in our yards. You see, our community is fortunate enough to have single stream recycling, so we can recycle just about anything. I put a lot more out to be collected for recycling than for landfill. As such, I have a full-size trash can that I’ve taped a big recycling symbol to. Unfortunately, most of my neighbors use the standard bins. They’re small, so they’re often overflowing, and they don’t have lids. You can imagine, then, all of the milk jugs, pop bottles, and sundry plastic containers and sheets of cardboard that end up being blown all over the neighborhood. My customized trash can isn’t perfect, either. It blows over fairly easily, and if the recycling symbol isn’t immediately visible, the trash collectors dump it in the truck, negating the week’s worth of effort my family put into keeping the recyclables separate. What a waste!
Our borough should really be making available larger containers with lids. It’s a simple solution to all three problems: insufficient volume, wind-blown litter, and misidentification.
I was interested to see how Service Design is being treated in IDSA’s IDEA awards. Now in it’s second year, the Service Design category of IDEA 2011 holds two gold winners, no silver or bronze, and two finalists. In 2010, there was one gold, one silver, and two finalists. As usual, the brief descriptions of the winners aren’t enough information for me to make my own evaluations. This year’s entries seem a little more appropriate than last year’s, but it is difficult to tell how innovative they really are. I want to know how the designers went about solving the problem. I want to know what the various components of each solution were and how they worked together. I want to see some evidence of the service’s success.
For example, the gold winner, “Bedsider for the National Campaign for Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy”, has a three-sentence description. The first sentence gives us the problem space: “unplanned pregnancy in women between the ages of 18 and 29.” The second sentence gives us a brief description of the solution: “…a birth-control support network that focuses on five key areas—awareness, motivational drivers, digital offerings, services and loyalty…” The last sentence gives us the opinion of, I assume, one of the designers. From the thumbnail image, we can guess that there is a website involved. They credit the design team from IDEO and provide a point of contact with an email address. That’s all.
To learn more, I had to turn to Google, which turned up IDEO’s own case study. I recommend that you check it out. As I expect of IDEO, the service appears to be compelling and well-executed—worthy of the gold IDEA. They also, of course, provide a link to the Bedsider website. If IDSA doesn’t want to go to the trouble of providing more than a few sentences in the description, couldn’t they at least provide links to relevant information?
If you’ll allow me to channel my inner Seinfeld, what’s the deal with internet charges at expensive hotels? My family stayed in one of Disney’s resorts during most of our vacation. I had gone fully expecting to have an internet connection in our room, but no, they wanted to charge me 10 bucks a night. I would have paid more for one week than I do for an entire month of service at my house, and I’d bet that much again that the bandwidth would have been paltry. Thanks to my iPhone and a 3G connection, I didn’t miss it too much. After eight nights at Disney, we switched over to a DoubleTree just outside of Universal Studios. I got to our room and eagerly attempted to get on their WiFi network. No dice. They also wanted $10 for 24 hours.
And yet, any less expensive hotel provides free internet. In fact, we stayed in a Hilton Garden Inn (Hilton owns DoubleTree) during the trip home and had free internet there. I would rather stay in a less-finely appointed hotel and have free internet. Yes, Mr. Hotel Manager, it’s that important. You probably look at it and say, “Well, for the price he’s paying for the room, what’s another ten bucks?” But I look at it and say, “For what I’m paying for that room, you better be including internet access!”
Rosenfeld Media was having a great discount on their books at Interaction 11, which they were selling from a little, wheeled cart deemed the Bookmobile. I decided to take advantage of the offer and pick up Nathan Shedroff’s Design is the Problem, a book I’ve been wanting to read for some time. I asked if they were accepting credit cards, and Lou showed me his iPad. He selected the book I was purchasing within an app and then swiped my card through a little square doohickey plugged into the headphone jack. I was then able to sign with my finger and later received an email receipt that included a Google map pinpointing the location at which I made the purchase.
The doohickey is the free card reader that comes with Square:
Square enables people from all walks of life to accept credit and debit cards. Taxi drivers can get paid quickly without dealing with the headache of printers, pens and paper; a pastry chef that only sells at seasonal farmer’s markets now can accept payments without getting charged a monthly fee; food trucks now have a simple and mobile way to migrate from being limited to cash. You can even have your friend that owes you $20 pay you with their card since their wallet always seems to be empty when you remind them about it.
Square takes a 2.75% processing fee for each swiped transaction as it occurs. That’s it. This seems like a very efficient and affordable way for small and/or temporary shops—especially mobile ones—to handle credit. It also appears to be a really good business model for Square. The card reader and app (for iPhone, iPad, and Android) are both free, lowering the barrier to potential users of the service. In other words, I could sign up for the service, get the reader, and download the app just to carry around with me in case I wanted somebody to be able to pay me with a credit card. This could be used for Girl Scout bake sales, church fundraisers, and garage sales. That’s hip.
