Information Design Blog
Week 1: 1/17/20 Reflection
Visiting the JAA was an eye-opening experience in understanding what problems the aging population and its caretakers face. Reading about the aging population and what kind of challenges they face in their daily life definitely provided a different experience versus actually walking around JAA and understanding how the residents might feel while living there. Talking to our tour guide helped me gain insight into the different JAA buildings and how each one was built to suit that particular population. For example, the Memory Care unit has more bright-colored walls to provide a more soothing atmosphere for residents and each resident had a small picture frame box outside their door with their name and picture in it to remind them of who they are. The Memory Care building also had a sunroom where the residents can do fun activities such as paint or make crafts. One thing that really surprised me was that most older people cannot even afford to live in nursing homes long term since it is so expensive. JAA can cost at least $395/day for a single room and insurance can only provide so much money for individuals.
To understand the problem more in-depth, I plan on doing more secondary research to look into other nursing homes in the Pittsburgh area as well in other states and areas to understand more about the general problem space that we are looking at. Additionally, I would like to do an audit of the different services that the buildings provide and how they differ from each other. In our upcoming visits, I would also like to talk to the nurses, caretakers, and other faculty at the nursing home to hear about their different perspectives and what challenges they face on a daily basis; if possible, it would also be great to talk to residents themselves to gain insight into how the residents think and feel about the care they receive. For the interviews and conversations, my team and I are planning on visiting JAA next week (one time before 1/24 and another time on 1/23 during class).
Week 2: 1/28/20 Reflection
From our last visit to the JAA, we gathered a lot of interesting insights from our conversations with caretakers and the food service employees. In one of our conversations with a staff member for the food service, she talked about how the reason she wanted to work at a nursing home was that her mom had caretakers and she had a very good relationship with the caretakers. She admired her mom’s caretakers’ ability to make her mom feel comfortable and after her mom passed, she wanted to do the same in her job. This made me think about how everyone comes from such a unique background and to understand someone’s story, it’s important to delve into things that don’t necessarily relate to the topic that we’re looking at (pain points in the nursing home).
Over the weekend, my team and I also met up to brainstorm the pain points of the stakeholders we were looking at. The session was very helpful in seeing the possible places that we could focus on for our solutions. Spending the first 7 minutes brainstorming alone was great to produce a good quantity of pain points from each of our perspectives. After the 7 minutes, we each put up our post-its and noticed a lot of overlapping pain points that we gathered from observations and interviews at the JAA.
We were able to group pain points into a variety of topics such as resident behavior, language barrier, communication design, staffing, scheduling, and relationships between caretakers and residents.
Week 3: 2/2/20 Reflection
The post-its brainstorming session in class was helpful in thinking about possible solutions to the pain points we had identified for residents. It was interesting to think outside the box and come up with solutions such as creating an artificial beach environment inside the nursing home for the residents. Drawing out solutions also made the process more fun and helped us visualize what implemented solutions would look like when we all got together as a group to share our ideas.
It was surprising that most of our solutions ended up in the first two quadrants of the feasibility matrix (meaning most solutions were either very feasible + usable or not feasible + usable). The only solution that was not feasible and not usable was a delivery robot that would send medicine and other items directly to residents’ rooms. Having these two artifacts also consolidated our thoughts on which solutions to present during our final presentation.
Week 4: 2/8/20 Reflection
Starting off the visual communication module with the candy organizing activity was helpful in seeing the process of going from familiarizing yourself with the context and content to developing and then refining.
Rachel, Eileen I was the first ones to start sorting candy into piles based on categories like whether we had ever seen/tried a certain type of candy, candies we liked, and candies we didn’t like. It was interesting that the first round of organizing was based on our opinions and by the end, the candy was sorted by more concrete topics such as gum, nuts-based chocolate, and chocolate without nut ingredients. At the refining stage, the candy was then organized to face the same direction and ordered in a gradient of ingredients.
Overall, I’m excited to learn more about how typography, color, shapes, space, and much more can convey information and help the audience understand the meaning behind the content.
Week 5: 2/15/20 Reflection
In this weeks’ session, taping up our typography exercises was helpful in seeing the differences between how different our work can look on the computer versus printed. It was interesting to see how all the combinations of elements (such as stroke weights with scaling) can result in very different results within a topic.
I also really enjoyed the collage making activity that we did to reinforce the concepts of color theory. For my collage, I was assigned a complementary color scheme with the design principle of dominance + emphasis. I chose to use shades of red and green for my color palette and wanted a quote about food to be the main focus of my collage. I also haven’t done an interactive/creative activity in a long time in one of my classes and really appreciated the time to just have fun with this collage-making exercise.
Week 6: Visual Communication Project
Week 7: 2/29/20 Reflection
The How To Make Toast activity was helpful in getting the headspace of how to address a topic or problem through visual thinking. It was interesting how each person in the class had such a different way of drawing out how to make toast. This showed me that every person puts a different emphasis on certain aspects of a topic. For example, some people focused more on the instructions for each task such as plugging in the toaster, cutting the butter for the toast, spreading the butter on the toast. While other people focused on the experience of making toast and then eating the toast by including people in their instructions. Getting together in the end to create a version of this activity with everyone’s input was also interesting to see how each person’s drawing could be incorporated at the different stages of making toast.
Doing this activity also helped me think about how I should go about doing my storyboard for representing my chosen JAA solution.
In class, I was able to get valuable feedback from both Rachel and our guest speaker, Eve. Both of them commented that I should include more context such as who is facilitating the gardening activity, which residence is the resident living in, and how does the story conclude (For example, does the resident look happy with the plant in her/his room?). Another important piece of feedback that I received from Eve was that I should think about what tools the resident might need to continue taking care of the plant in the future and other logistical elements that I overlooked in my story. With all this feedback, I will be adding in the missing aspects of my storyboard and also be writing a more complete narrative.
Week 9: 3/20/20 Reflection
Going in our Zoom breakout rooms this week was helpful to discuss whether we should continue with our current solution idea or pivot. As a team, we decided that VR was still a relevant solution to our problem space. Especially with the current events going on, it is even harder to organize fun and engaging activities for the AHAVA residents and VR would be a great solution to allow them to feel stimulated in the environment that they are currently in. During the session, we also split up our roles more clearly. For example, I will be designing the illustrations for the poster and organizing the layout. I will also be helping write the content for the context and problem for the poster. We will be using Lucidchart to collaborate in real-time and organize our ideas so that we know how our final poster + storyboard will look like. For the final presentation, I will be talking about the context, problem, and solution.
Week 10: 3/27/20 Reflection
This week’s dry run session was really helpful in giving us a better direction to move towards for both our poster and presentation.
Above are the two drafts that we had for our poster design and with the help of Team 2 and Zoe, we were able to determine that the pink/purple poster reflected our solution more. Team 2 and Zoe thought that the pink bubble and overall colors showed the “dreaminess” of our product more. Going off of the poster on the right, we still have many details that we need to fix. For example, we plan on making the context and problem text left-aligned (like the navy poster). We also plan on changing the storyboard and illustration character to incorporate more similar colors so that there isn’t a big divide between the two illustration styles. Another piece of feedback that we received was that the storyboard could be better connected- some people were confused by whether you read from top to bottom or bottom to top. Overall, we had a good amount of feedback to work off of and will be iterating on the poster again this weekend.
Week 11: 4/3/20 Reflection
Having the JAA staff come in to listen and give feedback for our final pitch was helpful in seeing if our solutions would actually be implementable in JAA. One thing that we weren’t able to do throughout the process of creating our pitch was to talk to the JAA staff and ask them about our name and tagline. Therefore, that was something we wanted to improve on for our post-feedback poster. Some of the names we had in mind were EnvisionVR, MyWorld, MyVR, and Virtuoarium. For the post-feedback poster, we went with EnvisionVR for our new solution name and “revisit your passions” as our tagline so that it would reflect that this solution is more about aligning with the residents’ current reality instead of bringing them into a “dream world”. Overall, as a team, we worked well by dividing up the main tasks at hand.
This week’s lecture on data visualization was also interesting. I liked learning about John Snow and his impact on visualizing data on diseases through his cholera map. I felt this was especially relevant to the current situation and how many of the COVID maps are visualizing the number of infections throughout the US in a similar way to how John Snow did it on his map.
Week 12: 4/7/20
For the in-class data visualization exercise, I used the health data I collected in February. For my data, I tracked how many steps I took each day, how much time I spend on my phone, if I use my headphones or not on a day, and how many songs I added to a playlist in Spotify (since I listen to music every day). For the exercise, I looked at the week of 2/7. The orange post-it represents 24 hours of screen time, the number of toothpicks represents how many songs I add to my Spotify playlists, the gray paperclip represents that I used my headphones on that day, the pink paperclip represents that I did not use my headphones on that day, and the yellow bean represents how many steps I took (in 1000s).
Week 13: 4/17/20
Going through the interactive examples during Tuesday’s lecture and seeing other people’s abstract examples gave me a better idea of which direction to head for my data visualization sketches. Since I have a couple of variables that I want to include in my data visualization (electricity usage, average temperature, the month of the year, and electricity usage per category), I found it helpful to look at examples with a lot of data.
After Thursday’s feedback session, I want to experiment with other shapes (other than circles) to represent data. I also want to explore what different components will go into the complete dashboard since right now my sketches all the data in one single visualization.
Week 14: 4/24/20
At the beginning of the week, I continued sketching out more directions that I could go in for my data. I experimented with more linear ways to show the data as well as exploring the pentagram shape in different ways. After seeing the presentations on Tuesday, I thought it was a good idea to also enter my data in an excel sheet to better see trends.
This week I also started working on digitizing my sketches and decided to start with my electricity usage by category data.
After getting feedback from Vicki on Thursday, I agree that the right visualization is stronger and will continue iterating on this idea. Other things I plan on doing in the upcoming weekend is playing with the scale of the labels for the electricity usage (kWh), seeing how temperature can be added into the visualization (or if it should be in a separate visualization), adding in the month of June into the visualization, and seeing how I can also divide out the pentagrams into individual months so that the viewer can more clearly see the data for each month.
