Throughout the summer session, we looked at various forms of “status” and how that interplays into improvisational acting. We began by looking at the high, medium, low status and conducted role-playing in pairs. Medium status was the trickiest as it does not have as strong characteristics as either the high or low status, rather medium status role is often times to be placate and compassionate. However, in reality, I think most people belong to the medium status where people are neither bragging/bossy nor overly avoiding others. We also learned about how the door plays an important role in defining status. For instance, a person with high status would more likely enter/exit the door exuding confidence, whereas one with low status would interact with the door in timid ways. We went further with role-playing different status by having a range between 1 to 10, where 1 was the lowest and 10 being the highest status. Through this activity, we were able to further understand the complexities involved amongst different status.

Exaggeration and Character Building

Here, we were telling a story with exaggeration and seeing the interplay between exaggerating and reacting to an object and/or situation. We were given various parameters on how to convey the story and bring it to an end. Some of the parameters included taking the initial offer until the end, forming collective reactions, and ending the story where everyone had to leave the stage. In order to achieve this, we had to be creative and also work together as a team since reacting to someone’s exaggeration was just as important to carry out the story. The most challenging part of this exercise was to figure out as a team a convincing way to end the story where all members had to leave the stage. The different ways of ending that our class performed were some kind of explosion, driving a car, escaping the place due to severe cold weather, etc. Although we tried to get to the ending as natural as possible, there were still bit of disconnect and abruptness moving from towards end of the story and the actual ending.

Complete the Picture

I think this exercise was a very interesting one for me since I already knew about the sequence of these images and the fact that the images were about levels of zoom, but applying them to the activity we did was new to me. I think it was a very refreshing way to look at these images since the activity required for our class to well-collaborate and really work together as a team in order to complete the exercise. Through the exercise, I was able to realize few different things about collaboration. It’s essential to be a good listener when it comes to collaboration. If everybody is talking at the same time, things will never move forward and coming to agreement/consensus is going to be a lot harder. Similarly, in this exercise, it was important that people listened to each other because we were not allowed to look at the pictures others had, so the only way to figure out was through listening. Something that we could have done differently was to first go around one by one and explain the pictures each person had so that everybody had general idea of the different pictures people had.

Symphony of Emotions, Car and Chair Exercise

The last week of improv was a collection of different activities as well as a summation of the different exercises we did over Summer session 1. In the first exercise in this series, “Symphony of Emotions”, we were each given key words to play a particular combination of emotions and there was a conductor in front that either uplifted or softened the level of emotion we were to expose. It was interesting how this sort of turned into a competition amongst each other with all the different kinds of emotions each person was portraying. The second set of exercise was the “Car Exercise” were one person started out a situation and the rest had to follow. For this exercise, some stereotypes certainly helped such as dumb blonde, thief, rich people, etc. Moreover, person who initiated the scenario needed to justify why they were heading towards particular place in order for others to follow. Lastly, in the “Chair Exercise”, the objective was to get the person who was sitting on the chair to move out. In order to do so, we needed to use tactics such as appealing to that person’s weakness, to sense of decency as person, and create circumstances. To conclude, this short 6 week long improv class allowed me to be put into my discomfort zone at times, have lots of fun, and also be able to apply some of lessons from improvisation to our project work and design collaborations.

Understanding a complex ecosystem to explore ways on improving medical oncologist’s workflow, decision support, and interactions with clinicians, patients and caregivers

Role: Design/Creative Lead (visioning, storyboarding, UX research)
Team: Danny Choo, Tara Loboda, Mika Nomura, Dian Le, Marc Estruch
Design skills: Visioning, Storyboarding, Journey maps, User flow
Research skills: Interviews, Shadowing, Literature review, Affinity diagramming, Insight generation
Duration: 3.5 months from February to May 2017

Project Overview

A 7-month long end-to-end client project with Roche Molecular Diagnostics. Our project is divided into two main halves: 1) the first 3.5 months, which this post will mainly cover, are focused on secondary and primary research, as well as some early prototypes, and 2) the latter 3.5 months are for further ideation and iterative cycles of prototyping and user testing.

Project Challenge

To understand the medical oncologist’s current ecosystem, workflows,
and challenges to identify areas of opportunity that would improve the oncologists’ experience and workflow when interacting, communicating, and sharing information with their patients and care team members.

Mission Statement

Our Research Process

Over the last 4 months, we conducted extensive secondary and primary research on the oncology health care team. After synthesizing our initial findings, we identified 3 main areas of opportunity that we could pursue. To further narrow down our focus and validate these opportunity areas, we conducted interviews and shadowed oncologists to get a more accurate understanding of the entire ecosystem.

Our Research Journey

Customer Journey Mapping

Affinity Diagramming

Our Insights

3 Areas of Tension

• Perception vs Reality: Addresses discrepancies between how oncologists and patients interpret what they see
• Time vs Information Overload: Relates to tensions between the process of sense-making and pressures of time
• Verbal vs Visual Communication: Highlights the difference between how oncologists communicate information to patients and how patients best understand it

The tension between perception and reality addresses discrepancies of how oncologists and patients interpret what they see. Through our interviews,
we found that this tension manifests itself in a variety of situations from communicating treatment options to administrative hospital processes.

Opportunity

Treatment options visualizer: Through the creation of a treatment options visualizer using technologies like machine learning and augmented reality, medical oncologists could better share different treatment options with patients. Such a tool would benefit both medical oncologists and patients by enabling comparison of treatment options and facilitating discussion about treatment preferences and trade-offs.

The second area of tension highlights the consistent struggle between making sense of large amounts of data and the time constraints faced by both oncologists and patients. This challenge is seen over and over again throughout the course of the cancer treatment process for both medical oncologists and patients.

Opportunities

• Curated search terms: Conducting online research can help patients feel a sense of control over their diagnosis, but patients can become hopeful about therapies and trends that may not be applicable to their disease. Curated search terms would ensure that patients access accurate content from reliable sources, minimizing the time medical oncologists spend correcting misinformation during patient visits.
• Pre-visit questions collection: By collecting pre-visit questions through technologies such as conversational user interface (e.g. chatbot, Siri… ) and enhancing the experience with affective computing, patients could better document their questions and key moments between visits. This could help medical oncologists better understand their patients’ concerns, better prepare for appointments, and make time during visits more meaningful.

This third area of tension highlights the difference between how oncologists communicate information to patients and how patients best understand it. Patients are diverse and come with varying levels of understanding about cancer. A challenge for medical oncologists is determining what the patient wants to know, what they need to know, and finding the right way to communicate it.

Opportunites

• Visualization tool: Drawing provides a common language that is easily understood by patients, especially in learning the size and location of their tumor. A visualization tool to facilitate this common language would help oncologists feel more confident in their ability to explain complex information. Additionally, this tool could help patients feel more equipped with knowledge at a time when they feel overwhelmed with all the information they need to digest.
• Collaborative workspace: Patients feel that drawing is a collaborative act, which gives them the sense that they are working together with their medical oncologist as opposed to just being told what to do. A collaborative workspace would allow patients and medical oncologists to act as partners and would help patients make more informed decisions about their care.

Opportunity Storyboards

Next Steps

Moving into Summer

How Might We’s

The three areas of tension — Perception vs. Reality, Time vs. Information Overload, and Visual vs. Verbal Communication — and associated opportunities uncovered through our secondary and primary research will be explored in greater depth during our visioning session with Roche. Through this session, we aim to reach consensus regarding our design direction for the second project phase. During the summer semester, we will design, prototype, user test, and refine a human-centered product concept that supports the information and communication needs of both medical oncologists and patients.

Oncology Project with Roche was originally published in roche2017 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Design Brief

To create a responsive Kinetic Typography work for the final assignment. Using the word “DESIGN” in the project. Will integrate an interactive element or series of interactive elements in the typography work. The work should be scalable. In other words, it should demonstrate the work in various types of interface platforms (e.g. small screen, large screen, AR, VR, Tangible Interface, etc.

Initial Ideation

Exploratory Sketches

• Physical + screen interactions
• Voice + screen interaction
• VR, 4D, Stereoscope
• Rubik’s cube

Visual Design

Digitizing the visuals

Key Elements:

• Moving from abstract to less abstract form of the word “DESIGN”
• Interactive aspect of the puzzle interaction
• Design principles & elements as takeaways

Interaction Implementation

Initial Build

High-level interactions

• Intro page as both bridge-step and affordance
• Drag and Drop interaction exploration

Second Build

Moving closer to puzzle form

• Exploring the triangle shapes + drag & drop
• Working with the layouts
• Testing with the layering effect

Final Build

Pivoting to gif animations w/ HTML & JS

• Realized technical limitations, pivoted to using gif animations
• Integrated with the HTML/CSS, JS skeleton

Final Demo

Fine-tuning the details

• Making visual aesthetics align with visual design
• Two-way interaction with the gif animations

Other References:

• Reference/Sources of Inspiration
• Project checkpoint

1D: Word

Working version of the Interaction

This week we investigated into using Arduino, potentiometer, and Processing to create a simple interactive prototype.

Mousemove Function + particles.js

Mouse Follow-Through

Process

Vertical Top + easeInOutCirc

Sign-in | Cloud9 IDE - Ajax.org

Horizontal Left + easeOutBounce

Sign-in | Cloud9 IDE - Ajax.org

Process

Camera Tracker Exercise

Creative Type

Source: https://www.behance.net/gallery/35983837/Lets-get-creative-2016

Reactive Type

Responsive Type

• Typatone
• Responsive Typography Demo

Interactive Installation / Type in Space

Chrome Experiments

• Chrome Experiments for Virtual Reality
• Chrome Cube Lab: A Chrome Experiment

This was my exploration with the second version of the motion library that we were given with. I chose Library B and applied the 6 different short motion effects on 2 different graphics that I had designed.