Recess is a five-phase social impact plan starting with a stand-alone tool and building up to a rating system adopted by such professional design associations as AIGA.
Recess resulted out of a capstone studio course at NC State.
Understanding User Motivations
Challenge — Understanding the psychology behind a user's desire to engage in social media and analyzing the power they concede when companies commodify one's personal need for social validation.
Response — Develop a Social Media Wellness Council. This organization would provide a suite of standards for the design, engineering, development, and marketing of smartphone applications that encourage social connectivity. The benefits of having a third-party verification system are critical to other industries such as green building. This too ought exist for digital design. It's our civic duty as designers to better understand how the decisions we make impact the human mind and body.
Phase 1 — A behavioral prototype was available for testing and studying. Capstone visitors were invited to learn about the psychology of social media design and share their ideas about the future of social media.
This kick-started the five-phase project and helped me learn more about user priorities and build a better consensus on what the remaining phases should look like.
BotPie is a fictitious chatbot application that assists working parents with meal planning.
BotPie resulted out of an online and mobile interaction course at NC State. Each student created a mobile app which crowdsourced a single action to improve their local community or larger society. Students assessed personae and project briefs provided by the professor. They were also asked to illustrate user impact through data visualizations.
