Exploration

Starting Point

A Talking Helmet

After riding our bikes all summer, we were convinced that one of our group projects from the previous semester should exist. Helmet Head is a helmet with embedded speakers paired up with a smartphone app that gives voice directions while you ride a bike.

The hypothesis was that by helping people navigate in the city on a bike, would lower the barrier for people. Directions would help them feel more confident while they were on their bike, and thus, they would be more apt to riding their bike for transportation.

Thesis Starting Point

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I was riding my bike up Kent Avenue on my way from Carroll Gardens to Greenpoint. I had already taken three wrong turns when it hit me—I need helmet head. For those of you who aren’t familiar, helmet head was a concept for a talking bike companion that Kristin and I had developed with Allison Shaw and Tina Ye in last spring (2011) at SVA. In that moment, on Kent Ave, I desperately wanted it to exist.

We met at Gorilla cafe over steaming coffees.

“What do you think about building helmet head for thesis?” I asked Kristin. And the conversation began.

We want our thesis year to be about making something and putting it out in the world. Going beyond research and concepting to a darn good working prototype that we can hand to people to use is important to us. As a next step, we decided to talk with our former teammates, and do some experience testing and general tech research about how we could build the project. It’s going to be a pretty robust undertaking, so we should be sure before committing.

Our initial concept model for Helmet Head:

In addition to exploring the viability of the helmet, we spent the summer aligning our goals for the thesis year. When asked to formalize our request to collaborate on thesis, we agreed on this:

"At the end of our 2-year program we would like to walk away with the experience of developing and marketing a viable product that we can share with the real world. So far, through the MFA IxD program, we have learned that Interaction Design can encompass much more than wireframes. We would like to use the knowledge we have gained through the program and challenge ourselves to be bold and take a risk on a project that is much bigger than us."
Our proposal to collaborate on thesis (pdf)

Initial Exploration

Features Galore

We wanted to make a helmet that gave voice directions, but we couldn’t help but think: what else could this talking helmet do? We poured out all of the ideas that had been flooding our brains on sticky notes:

Features

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To sort all thoughts and ideas that we’ve had around urban biking lately, we decided to do an analysis. We got all our thinking around the bike ride up on the wall, categorized it, and then tried to identify features that could be a part of our thesis product. It took most of today to map our thoughts to the wall, and we took a photo shoot break somewhere in the middle of it all:

The wall ended up covered in post-its, and we’ve made a separate blog entry listing the content just to document it. We continued to work with the opportunities identified on Monday, trying to find some common themes, and to decide what fits into the core of our concept, what are nice-to-haves, and which features we can leave behind.

Here are our features grouped:




Then we escaped the studio, took a quick bike ride to a café we’ve wanted to visit for a while – Tea & Sympathy. Over a cup of tea and some bangers and mash we discussed the key features of our product. Here are our notes from that chat:

We will publish a more polished concept map later. But from working with this material for while it’s clear that Wayfinding is our core, and that Tracking is in a good second place, followed by integration to some Location Service like Yelp or Google Places. We’re also quite interested in exploring the Group Ride aspect. If we list all the feature groups we have identified through this exercise, this might be our list somewhat prioritized:

Wayfinding
Tracking
Personalization/discovery/places
Group ride
Social
Character
Not going from A to B
Maintenance
Safety
Civic engagement
Sharing/advocacy
Entertainment
Socialize with strangers
Weather
Need mic
Need GPS
Commercial

We will narrow this down, but as long as we know our focus, we’re one step closer to an awesome product. Yeah!

Prototype with Thread

King of Two Wheels: a One-week Bike Game

We pulled four main concepts from a crazy wall of sticky notes, and decided to test them in a one-week game. We called it the King of Two Wheels. We were testing ideas around wayfinding, discovery of places, tracking and motivation through social pressure.

King of Two Wheels consisted of three elements:

  1. Tracking bike rides on a communal map
  2. Eight challenges to nudge contestants to try something new and recruit friends (blog post: Challenges)
  3. A confession booth (inspired by Storycorps by Local Projects)

Here is a glimpse of what the game looked like:

King of Two Wheels

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On October 15th, we launched a one week bike challenge in our SVA IxD studio. We explained the game rules to four eager studio mates, toasted in some bubbly, and then released them to the chaotic streets of New York City to compete for the title ‘The King of Two Wheels’. From the game rules, the most important thing to understand was the objective of the game:

Have the least amount of thread on your spool at the end of the game.

The idea for the contest was born about two weeks earlier. We had to act fast to make sure our contestants wouldn’t have to fight the bike battle in the snow. See the post King of Two Wheels Launch for some behind the scenes and reflections from the day before game launch, like this very early prototype to figure out the scale and position of the map interface:

We wanted the game to be more than just a race to bike the furthest distance. Given that urban biking is our area for thesis, we had a few concepts we wanted our bikers to explore, namely way-finding, tracking, discovery of places and motivation through social pressure. We gave them eight challenges:

And we put them in a confession booth every day to talk about their biking habits, recent rides and challenges:

The King of Two Wheels challenge allowed us to explore the motivational aspects of biking, both through the contest itself and by making the bikers efforts visible on the studio walls. We proposed opportunities for our contestants to share their bike love by getting other studio mates to bike. To get the whole SVA IxD community involved, bikers and non-bikers alike, we invited students to bet and cheer for the contestants. The blog post Behavior Change and Motivation elaborates on this aspect of the game.