Author Archives: Carrie Stiens

What if there were two buttons

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We have a pretty good idea about what the minimum viable product (MVP) will do—ask where you are going, calculate a bike-safe route, give turn-by-turn directions and re-direct you when you’re lost. In the MVP itself, there are very big challenges. However, the trick is creating value beyond the basic product. Following are a few thoughts to get us started.

What if there were two buttons—I want to get lost or I don’t want to get lost. We should address the needs of the rider. And ask is it for exploration or transportation?

We can consider way-finding and how one moves from place to place. How can we build and ecosystem around biking as a mode of transportation? People move in the city based on going from one place to another. (For example, I’m at home and I’m going to my favorite pizza shop). They use tools like Yelp and Google Places to find where to go. They are also using apps like Foursquare and Gowalla to broadcast or track the places frequent. Can our application interact with these existing pieces of the ecosystem?

Sources for inspiration: Flight tracker and TripIt.

Follow-up notes from September 19, 2011 meeting with Frank Chimero at SVA

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: