Medium is a mockup mobile application and an entry in the Where Do You Give? design competition sponsored by American Jewish World Service. It designed over a span of 3 weekends in Fireworks and was submitted for consideration in the category of interactive/web design.

The contest entry explaining the design motivation is copied below:

Please briefly describe your design:
Medium turns anything, anywhere into a vehicle for tzedakah.

Honoring the ancient Jewish tradition of the tzedakah box, where boxes placed in stores, synagogues and homes collect donations to benefit causes meaningful to the community, Medium enables the creation of virtual tzedakah boxes facilitating real donations placed in communities using geo-location and rich media.

Medium is a mobile application that allows users to take pictures of objects and places in their neighborhood and create tokens which function as tzedakah boxes. A storefront, an old park bench, an apple tree-all become tokens in our real world that a person can imbue with a story and a cause. These personal stories and appeals can be found by anyone in the area using the application, who can then easily donate to the associated cause, much like dropping coins into a sponsored tzedakah box at the local deli.

Using Medium, users can explore tokens nearby, donate to tokens that they find, and create their own to share with their community. Medium will track donation activity so that users can understand the impact of their tzedakah giving and better realize the alignment between their values and the tzedakah that they give.

“Medi”, the latin root of “medium”, lends significant relevance to the concept of tzedakah. From this root comes medicor, “to heal”, meditor, “to reflect upon”, medius, “the middle of”, and most importantly, medium, “the common good”.

How does your design reimagine the future of giving? How will your design spark a national conversation about the obligation to give, where to give, to whom and why?
Medium attempts to evolve the idea of tzedakah and the tzedakah box into an interactive, digital, mobile, location-based and community oriented, social application. It explores the act of tzedakah, through a reimagining of the tzedakah box, the most traditional vehicle for collecting charity within the Jewish community for thousands of years. Technology now exists that allow society to further the successful model of collecting tzedakah this way, specifically how it’s tied to a physical space, designated to a specific cause, meaningful to a person or people in the community in which it exists and elicits small, frequent donations. These criteria make it a perfect platform to emulate on a mobile device which can sense its location, access vast amount of information, communicate in images, and facilitate economic transaction.

Tzedakah is an obligation in Judaism, but obligations in our life can often lead to stress and resentment, even if the obligation is towards a good goal. How much is enough? Who should receive my donation? Am I a bad person if I don’t donate to the causes presented to me? Medium addresses these concerns by allowing individuals using the application to represent their values through the placement of virtual tzedakah boxes or “tokens” within their represented physical communities. By designating specific charities and causes for their tokens, users are creating a conversation about what the priorities of their communities should be when it comes to tzedakah. This allows community members to fulfil their obligation to tzedakah not just through the act of donating, but also through influencing the donations of others, engaging a community to participate in a fair system that rewards everyone.

Traditionally, tzedakah has been a way to support the most needy in our community, but as the world has become smaller through the spread of globalization, media and communication, this community has become larger, where people now recognize kinship with groups that work all over the world to address issues that matter to us. Medium addresses this dichotomy by sustaining the model of placing collection boxes within the community, but allowing individual users to designate their donations to any organization with which they are their values. This effectively creates a bridge between local action and global impact.

Each Medium token is associated with personal images and stories that can make a strong appeal for tzedakah. The stories they tell will ultimately affect the behaviors of others in the community, whether they themselves are looking to give charity, or trying to influence others to donate as well. This underlying conversation couldn’t happen over a traditional tzedakah box. The close connection between physical proximity, engaging imagery and personal stories creates a compelling reason to engage and reengage with Medium in the act of tzedakah.

What if life was like a comic book? Comic Kinect is an experiment in interactive art that utilizes Microsoft Kinect and OpenFrameworks to put people into a live-action classical action comic. Using the limb and body tracking technology available in the OpenNI library, Comic Kinect finds when one body ends, and another begins, all in three-dimensional space. When collisions occur, dramatic fighting comic text appears over the point of contact. Contour-finding along with saturation and mean-shift filtering provide for a cartoonish aesthetic.

As a member of the Comic Kinect team, I originally proposed and subsequently iterated on the design concept. My primary responsibility in the development phase was comic filtering effects in C++ using OpenCV. The Comic Kinect project proved to be a major success, amassing over 35,000 views on the original video post and appearing on kotaku.com and pcworld.com. The demo video was also featured by Johnny Lee, one of the original developers responsible for the Microsoft Kinect, as one of his favorite hacks. Microsoft also featured Comic Kinect in the promotion of next generation Kinect applications at the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2011 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

For more information about the creation of Comic Kinect, please see the official post and the demo video.

As of July 2011, our 4-person team is working on a project in partnership with Eaton to develop mobile applications for monitoring real-time energy use for energy conservation. The MHCI Capstone course is an 8-month long project for a real-world client to conduct in-depth user research and develop and test functional prototypes. In the Spring of 2011, we conducted over 30 user interviews in Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and New York City, and worked with residents in both apartments and homes, retail and commercial business managers, and commercial facilities managers. We also analyzed over 40 years of research about energy consumption behavior along with recent research about technological intervention in in-home energy monitoring. From our research, we published a 120-page report detailing our findings and providing key actionable insights to aid in the design and development of products in the mobile energy monitoring space. In the Summer term, we set out to iteratively develop and test prototypes for mobile devices, with a final report, complete UI spec, and functional prototype to be delivered by August.

As technical lead for the Eaton project team, I have had the responsibility of creating and maintaining the technological infrastructure for collecting and serving real-time energy data, and driving, detailing, and developing the specifications and implementation of a mobile application prototype. Our infrastructure needs required that we install and configure hardware energy monitors and access their data remotely though a REST API. This data is being stored in a SQL database that connects to Python-powered web service that serves the application. Finally, our prototype is being developed using HTML5 and JavaScript on top of the PhoneGap mobile framework to provide a seamless user experience. In addition, I have been the primary researcher of academic knowledge on the topic of energy conservation behavior, which has driven much of our project focus.

SynthDriver is a prototype device in tangible interaction built upon the Arduino hardware development platform. It is a wireless music instrument and MIDI controller that affords the performer to move comfortably in a space, while also manipulating the instrument in a natural and familiar way. The orientation and movement of the synthdriver in space is sensed by an accelerometer and gyroscope to provide 3-axis of command control output that can be mapped to any MIDI device parameter allowing for an infinite possible sounds patterns. In my implementation, a membrane potentiometer mounted to the synthdriver is used to trigger notes along a single octave, while a second potentiometer is used to control stereo pan. The components are mounted in the detached steering wheel of a 1991 Chevy Trailblazer and powered by 4xAA batteries with wireless communication facilitated via Bluetooth.

This project required successful integration of design, fabrication, and programming. The SynthDriver was able to accurately detect rotation and revolution within 3D space to a surprisingly high degree of accuracy. The hardware design details along with the source code are available on the official project post.

As a major component of the foundational HCI course in user experience design methods, myself and a team of four other MHCI students were privileged to have the opportunity to collaborate with Intel Labs Pittsburgh. The goal of the project was to understand the workflows of administrators and users of the Hadoop cloud computing platform to aid in developing tools for determining the cause of errors and poor performance. Our team conducted user interviews, synthesized key findings, built click-through prototypes of a new unified Hadoop interface and finally conducted usability evaluations through further interviews and keyboard-level modeling on the resulting prototype.

Our research lead to insights that divined a better understanding of how users work in cloud computing environments and how they approach problems that they encounter. Our proposed solution integrated aspects of filesystem management, command-line functionality, web-based task monitoring, and overall system health indicators. As a team member, I participated in the entirety of the user research, synthesis, prototyping and testing stages. I was primarily responsible for creating keyboard-level modeling simulations, which turned into a testable prototype on which think-aloud usability tests were performed based on tasks that I defined.

The findings from this project were assembled into a paper, titled Understanding and improving the Diagnostic Workflow of MapReduce Users, that was accepted into the 2011 ACM CHIMIT conference.

C.QNCR is an experimental YouTube-based sequencer that allows users to creatively sequencer videos to create new artistic media expressions. Built on HTML5 and jQuery, C.QNCR uses YouTube’s vast collection of video media as a base to create new videos by slicing and sequencing clips and then adding them to a master timeline. This project was completed as a final, individual piece for Interactive Art and Computational Design with Golan Levin. It takes inspiration from traditional multitrack audio software sequencers, along with timeline video editors such as Final Cut. Shortly after the release of the C.QNCR demo, Google released a new version of their Youtube Editor which now affords a similar functionality in allowing users to access videos across YouTube’s network for inclusion into a mashup video piece.

As a member of the development team, I contributed to the specification and scoping of the project along with the production of report materials. I was individually responsible for the development of the primary incident reporting form and related interactors, the SQL-based database storage system, the camera photo capture process and gallery display widgets, and the main menus and preferences throughout the application. Built entirely in the native Java Android API, this project was my first effort at creating interfaces and interactions for native mobile platforms, and the project received positive feedback from course evaluators. Our code is archived at http://code.google.com/p/sahana-incident-reporter/.

The Bucket App is a smart service and mobile application that helps recent retirees check items off their bucket list while taking the pain out of planning a complex daily itinerary. By intelligently and dynamically building your daily itinerary based on your location, budget, and interests, the Bucket App takes the anxiety out international travel. Simply tell the Bucket App which sites are “must-see” bucket items and the application will do the rest, guiding you along the way and helping you make memories that will last a lifetme.

As a 3-week experiment in Basic Interaction Design (BID) our four-person team created a mobile application prototype titled “the Bucket App.” The application is designed to make life easier for recent retires on-the-go by allowing them to travel to the places they have always wanted to go, while an intelligent system suggests other venues to visit, places to eat, and things to do along the way. During our design process we performed competitive analysis, created diverse personas and scenarios, created mulitple rounds of paper prototypes, and produced a click-through prototype that can be functionally demoed on mobile devices. Our process documents and demo are available at cs.cmu.edu/~bucketlist.

Vote Panda helps users keep track of their elected officials and then hold them accountable for their actions through elections. By enabling users to vote for and against the news about their local, state, and federal officials, Vote Panda helps users make smart choices about who they want to vote for. Vote Panda also allows users to filter their content by the issues that really matter to them and to see how their representatives are doing according to the their own metrics.

As a 3-week experiment in Basic Interaction Design (BID) our four-person team created a web application prototype titled “Vote Panda.” During our design process we performed competitive analysis, created multiple rounds of wireframes and diagrams, and produced a click-through prototype that can be functionally demoed online. Our process documents and demo are available at cs.cmu.edu/~votepanda.