Documenting the raw and refined thought, research, and making of my thesis at SVA's IxD program.
Verizon is running a new commercial for their “Uppernet” service - pitching themselves against Amazon Web Services, Akamai, and other cloud computing enterprise solutions. What is simply awesome about the commercial (not the service) is that it touts how physical Verizon’s cloud is compared to its’ competitors.
Our cloud is not soft and fluffy. Our cloud is made of bedrock, concrete, and steel.
Reads like a truck ad.
Introducing Canary: a mobile application that tracks and offsets your digital carbon footprint. Visit canaryinthecloud.com for more information.
Watch my classmates and I present our thesis work live at the SVA Theatre in New York City, 11am-4pm on May 12th.
This weekend I got some help from Sara Dierck and Tash Wong making the packaging for the SVA IxD Festival and Exhibition takeaways: test tubes. Instead of describing the carbon footprint of our data in terms of weight (pounds or grams), I’m using volume and using empty test tubes to communicate the concept. For example, Google estimated that a search produces 0.2 grams of CO2 which is equal to approximately 100mL - weight of air versus volume of air. By comparison, a resting human breath on average is 500mL or five Google searches.
My process book is now available for digital reading and hard copies will be arriving soon. While I am still working on my thesis deliverables (this being one of them) and final presenation, I pulled another all-nighter with fellow classmate and taxi buddy Chris Cannon to finish up the content/layout for my process book and send it to Blurb for publishing. My goal was to get it ready for our exhibition on May 12th so I had to put content on lock down, even though coversations and work today has already rendered my book outdated. Oh, c’est la thesis.
Just finished designs for Canary: an iPhone app that tracks your digital content production and subsequent CO2 emissions. First flight is May 12, 2012.
I’ve been working on designing Canary’s iPhone app screens. Here’s a sneak peek of the offset screen for Instagram, displaying current and previous offsets with options to pay an offset immediately or setup a monthly autopay. I decided that every 100 grams of CO2 emissions would equal $0.10. For user uploading 50-60 pictures a month, he/she would have the option of paying $1.02 to a local carbon offset project for the month’s CO2 emissions.
Companies must look not only at how efficiently they are consuming electricity, but also the sources of electricity that they are choosing.
— Greenpeace. Read the full report
I’ve reached a critical crossroads in my thesis work: the point at which this process blog, my final documentation (process book), and work on the Canary project are nearly parallel. I have three weeks left to finish multiple deliverables and time management now trumps any and all decisions. As a result, this will be the second to last entry of my thesis blog. My final entry will be a link to the live stream of our final presentations on May 12th.
For the remaining time, I will be preparing:
Thesis Exhibition - Immediately following our presentations at the SVA Theatre, we have a reception and exhibtion of our thesis work back at our studio. I outlined a sketch for the setup and talked takeaways with my cousin Sara who will be helping me out with design/production.
Over this past week, I’m up to three cups o’ coffee (sometimes four) and wireframing/prototyping the Canary app. With a little help from my classmates, I quickly learned two awesome rapid prototyping tools for the iPhone: TAP and LiveView. Seriously, these are my new favorite applications. Using these new tools, I created some key screens, killed a few, modified others, and got ready for my a review with Mari Sheibley, lead design at Foursquare (thanks to Michael Yap for setting it up). The review went awesome and Mari gave me some super valuable feedback. Soon after, I met with Cooper to discuss our wireframes, stripping out features and complexity. After a solid weekend of work and a visit to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, I shored my wireframes and prepped for final designs.
Before my review with Mari, I met with Liz to discuss the status and approach of my process book and takeaways for the thesis exhibition. I left the meeting feeling engerized and subsequently pulled an all nighter working on my process book. It felt great to check a few items off the deliverables list as well as work alongside a fellow IxD’ers late night in the studio.
The Coal Button site is now live. Just remember: behind every click, there’s a little lump of coal.
