A systemic challenge → Cultivator is a speculative prototype of a countertop bioorganic meat-printer for the kitchen of the future. At the beginning of the project we wanted to rethink traditional grocery shopping, but as we came further along with the research of the future of food, we came across a bigger challenge: "The Limits to Growth" by Dennis L. Meadows, Donella Meadows und Jørgen Randers and studies on „The State of Food and Agriculture“ by the United Nations show the trend of excessively growing meat consumption. Although there is substantial relative growth in developing countries, the numbers are significantly larger in countries where meat-consumption is already established. Therefore we saw the opportunity of bioorganic printing to solve the need for a sustainable way to produce meat in the home.
Today, bioorganic printing is still in the labs. We got a great overview on the current state of the art reading this article “A taste of things to come“ published by Nature.
Future Food & Kitchen → Consistency, color and the structure of meat are determined by nature, but people have always been eager to try out new things in food, that is why we wanted to explore creative ways of printing meat in our prototype, some that would be impossible to produce in a traditional way. Aside from obvious artificial forms of meat, like sausages, we found chef Ferran Adrià, who is experimenting with techniques of molecular gastronomy to create new forms of meat. We were also inspired by the great "In Vitro Meat Cookbook" by Next Nature.
We looked at trends for the future kitchen based on studies by Miele and IKEA. We incorporated several of those in our prototype: The kitchen might become the centre of the house energy maintenance, because it will remain the room in which most of energy is used, so it is predicted to be the place where self-sufficient products will be in demand the most. Self cleaning surfaces and vertical-farming helped us speculate about the inventory of the kitchen of the future.
While traditionally produced meat is getting more and more expensive, bioprinted meat is becoming more affordable. Since we’re imagining a not too far off future, the role we expected to play meat in the daily cuisine was one of a luxury add-on, one that will be consumed in smaller doses and one that people use as a tool to eat better not worse. This is reflected in our user interface and hardware design.
Interface → Cultivator’s interface is defined by the collection of recipes. The recipes can come from popular cooks, family members and friends through an invisible network. Recipes describe the meat through three different parameters, color, juiciness and structure. The different minerals result from these parameters and can’t be adjusted by the user individually — there is a feature though that allows the user to adjust the formula according to their personal health requirements.
In the kitchen environment you need to be able to get fast to the things you are looking for, that is why we created a scroll view with only little detail. That’s why we focussed on one iconic scroll-view that can be operated by just one gesture.
Creation → We imagined Cultivator’s creation mode as a two-axis diagram to adjust the meat-type (color) and viscosity. These two parameters allow for maximum variety. The diagram also shows areas of health- or taste-preferences of family members to find a good compromise. The fingerprint provides access to all the required private data.
Hardware Prototype → To present a convincing vision of the future we created a realistic prototype using an iPad in a vacuum formed case and laser-cut acrylic glass accents and cover. The black surface was especially important to communicate the device’s self-cleaning features and its solar-power capability.
Reflection → This project had a lot of challenges, first building something of that many people think will never exist, and building it in a way, that you can argue with every design decision made. At our schools exhibition we came to tell the story of a future kitchen device with the prototype and the reactions were diverse and insightful.
Bachelor Thesis → Vibe – A Human-Centered Framework for Redesigning Debate Online – investigates how we might make discussions online better and more sustainable through the use of personalized data and profiles that right now are only used for the purpose of advertising. We’re speculating on how, without collecting any additional data, but just reusing the one that was already collected more interesting debates might emerge.
Looking at how data can be used to enable the rich expression of thoughts, how it might introduce people to the discussion that have not participated before, and how we might use computational techniques to combat abuse and harassment in a respectful way.
Designing for Meaningful Contribution → How might we help people share more interesting content? People want to contribute to a discussion by putting great content forward. This can mean everything from telling a great story to sharing knowledge or contributing personal data to improve an article. Interactive Sparkline is a simple yet universal and exible micro-interaction that enables this type of rich sharing of content of any kind.
A simple tool for the Journalist allows them to target specific audiences they want to hear from using the same technology that traditional ad-targeting tools are based on. The same piece of software also allows the journalist to explore data contributed by readers.
Designing for Diverse Participation → How might we bring different communities together? The filter bubble or the echo-chamber are among the most discussed problems in journalism of the last years. Algorithms designed to only show us things that we might like further seperate use from each other instead of connecting us. What if we could use the same targeting-data to show the whole discussion, bring together seperate discussions of the same topic and even motivate people to join the discussion who are under-represented.
Conversation starters analyze the unique perspective you could have on a topic based on previous experiences and nudge you to join the conversation.
A simple summary-view enables you to discover interesting topics and get the gist of the discussion
Designing for Augmented Moderation → How might we make high quality moderation scale? Moderation in online discussion is often very opaque without any accountability. While the system works to some extent, people who put a lot of effort into contributing to the discussion too often nd themselves having their comment deleted due to some liberally applied community guideline by an automated system or a human curator.
What if we could enable a more nuanced review process that fundamentally relies on automation but can hand off to a human auditor if necessary.
Sacrifical Concepts → As we started working our bachelor thesis we followed the principle “bias towards action”. From the beginning of the project we sketched and prototyped. We came up with three sacrificial concepts in the realm of “automated reporting”, to bring into research and evaluate. “Parameterized Reporting” revolves around modularization. What if bots and journalists could work together on an article and the robot could even elaborate on certain sections based on the user’s information and prior knowledge.
“Blockchain Byline” is all about trust and truth. How might we trust a story written by a bot. We imagined a system of modularized sources combined with the blockchain and visualized through an interactive infographic. The user could even change the data source and see how the article changes accordingly.
“Augmented Research” imagines how we might bring journalism to regions where there is none at the moment but also how journalists might collaborate with their readers.
Ideation → At CIID Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design we participated in an Ideation Workshop with Ahmed Riaz from Frog. Together with the CIID community we came up with hundreds of ideas around the future of journalism and evaluated them together. We distilled them down to the three sacrificial concepts.
Expert Interviews → In order to evaluate our concepts we took them to the Bay Area to discuss them with experts in the field from Stanford, Berkley and Medium. Experts in data-journalism, designing a publishing product and fact-checking helped us focus our project around conversation culture and how it shapes today’s journalism.
Quick Look → A big problem with discussions today is that they usually consist out of hundreds of endless threads of thousands of posts which makes it hard to understand the diverse opinions expressed. A tool based on parameters to browse topics, opinions and interesting comments should help in understanding the discussion.
Journalist’s Tool → From the beginning it was clear to us that in order to provide an integrated experience we had to keep the journalist’s tools in mind. This tool could allow to provide the discussion algorithm with interesting groups of people it should target and what kinds of questions it should ask.
A Conversation with Bots → After prototyping several ideas around moderation we came up with a family of bots each of which has a specific function. Asking questions, blocking malicious content and spam, summarizing long threads. The big opportunity in bots is that they act as a participant in the conversation that can be argued with and is not seen as the owner of truth. It is also easily integratabtle into any commenting system. We prototyped this system on Twitter with “Factbot”.
Universal Notebook → With Leporello we wanted to create a product that helps people to collect their thoughts instantly in the best way possible, across media. A system to support thinking in the tradition of Douglas Engelbart. In our research we saw people collecting notes in their photos apps, which inspired our media-agnostic approach.
A System of Components → Leporello is based on “modules”, components that can be connected if they follow the same train of thought. Every module can have “attachments”, which are algorithmically generated and recommended to the user. If the system detects a movie-title it recommends a customized movie-attachment.
Infinitely Expandable → The structure based on “modules” is easily expandable. This is crucial as we have found more use-cases in our research for a thought-collection app than any single creator could account for. We even saw people collect their precious passwords unsecured which inspired the “Protected Note” module.
Universal Input → The “Universal Input” bar at the top of our app allows for the creation of text, photos, videos, voice-memo and even drawings with quick gestures. Tap to type, drag to draw or put the phone to your ear to start a voice-memo. The photo input allows for capture and cropping in a single interaction. Download the Origami prototype and try it yourself.
Impactful Learning Experience → With “Smart Forward” we were looking for a way to create a creative thinking and life-long learning experience in a personalized yet impactful way. In the end we came up with an adaption of traditional interaction-design vocabulary: the browser’s forward button. While the project was inspired by different tactics for learning and creativity the most important factor was impact. A lot of apps want to be specialized tools for learning, but we wanted to bring these process into everyday life of a lot of people.
Before we ended up with this subtle interaction integrated into the browser we looked at augmented reality learning-experiences and other stand-alone solutions that we found not to be a clear enough expression of the idea of an impactful learning experience.
“Forward” Button → The most common way to acquire knowledge today is through a browser. That’s why the integration of our system into the browser felt so natural. The user-interface element of the “forward button” is mostly inactive since it requires you to have gone backwards in the history to be able to go forward. We asked ourselves: What would it be like if you could always use this button and it would take you to the next most interesting website.
This subtle micro-interaction could change how we browse the web and could introduce a new type of discovery into people’s everyday life. At the same time it is immediately scalable to any platform that has a web browser.
“Smart Forward” Button → J. Paul Neely introduced us to Yossarian, a creative search engine. This inspired us to not only think about discovery but also how we might introduce creative thinking into people’s everyday browsing. The “Smart Forward” button right next to the regular “Forward” button is a natural extension of our system. Instead of showing you the next related website it will look for the next website that looks at some topic from a different, interesting angle.
Let’s say you’re looking at a website about your favorite classical composer. While the “Forward” button might show you a website to book tickets for a concert around you, “Smart Forward” could show you a blog about the mathematical aspects of their œuvre.
Algorithm → We deeply cared about the scalability as well as the feasibility of our concept. That’s why we conceptually looked at how the algorithm might work. We relied on both analyzing the content of the website as well as the behavior of the user. Additionally the algorithm had to be able to detect changes and breaks in the angle on a topic. We imagined the browser to collect a profile of the user to collect types of websites, their difficulty and other classifiers. This data is compared to other users that have an expertise in other fields. Through cross-pollination of their respective “Forward” chain we can create a clear determination of the next most relevant site from any point on the web.
Information Architecture → The extension of an already well established feature allows for excellent scalability and could have the potential to spread quickly and become standard vocabulary in browsers. The information architecture could not be simpler: If you’ve gone back in history you can go forward like you’re used to. If you’ve reached the current site the forward button becomes “predictive”. The “Smart Forward” button is an extension of existing UI that follows a similar pattern.
Collaboration with Mozilla → Together with Mozilla we brought concepts from “Smart Forward” into their Activity Stream feature in Firefox. “Activity Stream” would display the user’s history and predictions from Mozilla in one unified view that could also be navigated with the “Forward” button. Additionally it is integrated into other traditional micro-interactions. Pressing ⌘N will open the next most relevant website, which turned out to be quite powerful. If you want to learn about a topic, just open one website related to it and then press ⌘N multiple times to open a wide variety of sites about it.
INTERACTIVE TOY → Loom is an interactive media-installation. With Leap Motion and the box2D library for Processing we created an interactive toy, where different objects create sounds when they collide. The user can interact with these objects through different interactions leveraging the multi-finger capabilities. While it turned out to be a very engaging interactive toy it was primarily meant to explore the boundaries of interaction with the Leap Motion controller and was intended to be more of a research project.
Exhibition → We were invited to exhibit the project at Platine 2015, a festival for alternative gaming-culture, which was an excellent opportunity to observe people interacting with the toy. “Loom” turned out to be a great conversation starter to talk about the tracking technology. Sitting behind the screen (it was a rear-projection) let us observe hundreds of people using it and fixing usability issues on the fly, like implementing a left-handed mode after we realized that, developing just for ourselves, we forgot about left-handed people.
Authority through Design → Factbot is an automated bot that scans Twitter for people sharing articles from sources that are known to be unreliable and calls them out. In order to test it as if it was a new feature on the Twitter platform we tried to create an identity that is close to Twitters CI. Several users actually identified it as a new Twitter feature.
Methodology → To keep our MVP as simple as possible we didn’t implement an actual artificial intelligence but much more a simple system that checks the Twitter API against a predefined list of unreliable news-outlets. All generated data through replies, retweets and other interactions were collected in a Google Sheet. Check out Factbot on Twitter.
Learnings → After almost 2000 tweets and hundreds of replies we learned a lot about how people react to a bot checking on them. While there was, as expected a lot of frustration and anger, “Factbot” managed to spark a lot of conversation which never would have happened in a more binary system. A lot of people were genuinely interested and asked for more information. In our continuing work on this system giving the bot special treatment in presentation in order to increase the perceived authority as well as making the whole system smarter to handle full conversations became our focus.
Cousteau → Cousteau was an interactive system to explore the deep sea in a museum. I created these icons for the primary interactive elements to filter different categories of items that you could learn about. These icons were designed to accommodate the typeface “FF Netto” by Daniel Utz and are available on The Noun Project.
Leporello → In Leporello we wanted to give a sense of all the different types of thoughts and things might want to collect. Therefore I created a wide range of icons on a universal grid. All of them are available on The Noun Project.