University of Washington

IOT In Assisted Living

This was the first group research project of senior year for me. We chose to work in the design space of IOT in assisted living. We started by doing some secondary research on the design space we wanted to work in and then we created some initial project ideas. We met with nurses and people living in nursing homes and uncovered some really powerful insights. Challenges came up like: “I hate getting woken up every night to get my vitals checked”. The user research guided out focus of the project into helping people who live in nursing homes live with minimal disruption. Secondarily, we also helped streamline activities alleviating some of the massive workload that sits of the shoulders of healthcare workers.

Working From Home Research

Working from home has become somewhat of a stale subject because a lot of our classes have focused on this specific design space. For this project we chose to look at it from a different scope and think about the people that will continue to work from home even after the pandemic is over.

Germi The Germ

“Germi the Germ” was a 9-week team-based project where the only structure was to design a comprehensive solution and we got assigned the topic of connecting humans to non-living human things. We chose a very different idea than other people, germs. (Side note – this was just prior to the pandemic hitting!) We thought it would be interesting to stay away from the general themes people were experimenting with and focused on interactions.

We had a series of different projects leading us through the process of design. This included huge ideation activities where we had to come up with hundreds of ideas for our projects, as well as periods of research where we would interview people or have people participate in our design workshops. We documented all the activities with different posters. In the last week and a half of class, we began the prototyping phase where I designed some ideas for an interface and created a video/poster to demonstrate the design.

Small Projects Based on Design Fundamentals

Below you will see many projects from my freshman and sophomore year that were not interaction design based. In addition to interaction, many were focused on the artistic side of design and helped to practice core design principles.