DEBUT

[Updated 5/2/12]

Below is the text and sketch I submitted to the Thesis committee for exhibition of my project.

Plaque copy

DEBUT is an ethnographic showcase of technologists and their environments. These students were connected by a series of interdisciplinary meetups and collaborations. Through layers of connected physical and multimedia environments, viewers can explore each collaborator’s story and their connection to the network in greater detail.

New York City is a thriving ecosystem of technology-related entrepreneurial endeavors, communities, and resources. The density of resources helps to foster and perpetuate the culture and growth of startup businesses. With their Millennial ideals of autonomy from large companies, organizations, and governments, students in New York City are uniquely positioned to rejuvenate, reinvent, and disrupt struggling industries through design thinking and practice. DEBUT explores how traditional and emerging business practices can empower the production of design students’ work.

A series of meetups held between October 2011 and March 2012 formed interdisciplinary student collaborations. By bringing students together, the conditions and environments that foster connections and successfully incubate ideas were created and examined. As a coordinator and attendee of events within the NYC design and technology student community, the designer developed a framework of innovative services for practice in future contexts and documented and explored the outcomes of these strategies in ethnographic reflection.

Exhibition Diagram

Moving forward

As I continue to refine my project deliverables, I am also beginning to plot out my exhibition space. A trip to Staples yesterday proved fruitful (look at all those tacks and binder clips!) and I plan on spending the afternoon positioning photographs on a wall.

DEBUT is an ethnographic showcase of the personalities, environments and connections between New York City students involved in a series of interdisciplinary meetups and collaborations. Through layers of connected physical and multimedia environments, viewers can explore each collaborator’s story and their connection to the network in greater detail.

New York City is a thriving ecosystem of technology-related entrepreneurial endeavors, communities, and resources. The density of resources – universities, incubator programs, technology and business related events, libraries and free business-advice centers, startup companies, and venture capital firms – helps to foster and perpetuate the culture and growth of startup businesses. Undergraduate and graduate students working within the realm of design and technology have the potential to rejuvenate and reinvent struggling industries through design thinking and practice. With their Millennial ideals of autonomy from large companies, organizations, and governments, students in New York City are uniquely positioned to disrupt industries with their own products. DEBUT explores how traditional and emerging business practices can empower the production of design students’ work.

A series of meetups held between October 2011 and March 2012 formed interdisciplinary student collaborations in New York City. By bringing students together, the artist created and examined the conditions and environments that foster connections and successfully incubate ideas. As a coordinator and attendee of events within the NYC design and technology student community, the artist developed a framework of innovative services for practice in future contexts and documented and explored the outcomes of these strategies in ethnographic reflection.

I have been working hard on creating different visualizations for the data I have collected. I have been spending a lot of time with the d3 javascript library to plot and manipulate numbers, connections, and other meetup data I have.

Below is a constellation map of the people involved and an area plot of the visitors and unique visitors to the events.

This is a first pass at showing the profiles of participants on this platform. The exhibition format/order of these profiles will more closely resemble the constellation map above, but I think it is important to include an easily navigable list of profiles, too.

Finally, I have been able to photograph about half of the participants so far, thanks to the photography skills of Maya Weinstein. Below are a few process shots of the photo shoot. So far the photos from the shoot have turned out well, I can’t wait to show them off in the gallery.

Last Friday we spent our studio time sketching out our plans for the thesis exhibition. It was great to put marker to paper and consider exactly how I plan to showcase my research and product for the public. I was also able to better communicate many of the ideas I have had for documenting my project, and to get invaluable feedback.

Sketching helped to articulate my goals for exhibition. I want to showcase the community, and its members, that have been formed through the series of meetups I’ve coordinated. Focus will be on individuals and their contributions (connecting others to the community, work and projects created, etc.) to the network in order to illustrate why this is a unique happening within the larger community. Aesthetics are another important consideration that I am still trying to define for this piece. Again, showing these sketches to my classmates and teachers sparked a few new ideas. Portraits, maps, code, and other assets will be displayed on a wall. How will they be hung? Framed? Organized?

How will I show connections? An accompanying digital interface? An interactive, overlaid projection? Physical material connections?

I came across an article on New York Public Media’s Metro Focus Website titled NYC’s Design Schools Are Booming, But Creatives Want Biz Skills, written by John Farley (thanks to Cynthia Lawson’s tweet). The article touches upon the current economic conditions in NYC, the unprecedented number of design graduates coming out of programs here, and the opportunities for innovation that lie at the intersections of these two phenomena. It is refreshing to see press coverage of the realm in which have been so deeply entrenched for the last 10 months or so, and to better understand the many opinions and perspectives that contribute to such a discussion.

The article cited a number of recent studies, including the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project‘s 2010 Findings and the Center for an Urban Future‘s 2012 Designing new York’s Future report. The later report asks and answers many of the questions I have been asking throughout my research and will serve as an invaluable resource as I evaluate and conclude my findings thus far.

The report gives the following recommendations to NYC schools, government, and other institutions:

• Expand and improve opportunities for design students to learn business skills.
• Connect design and architecture students to small businesses in New York that could benefit from better design
• Develop programs that capitalize on New York’s strengths in business consulting, philanthropy, and health care.
• Link New York’s new applied sciences campus to design.
• Develop new design incubators and work share spaces for promising graduates.
• Develop innovative interdisciplinary programs.

What is exciting about reading these recommendations is that I believe many of them are being addressed from the grassroots level. The efforts of Tech@NYU, dorkShop, and my thesis project are linking students of design and applied science, among other disciplines, and teaching business skills. They are also developing a sort of incubator space and even creating an ad-hoc interdisciplinary program. This will help to evaluate my project through a wider lens and to tie up some loose ends that have been difficult to tackle.

Social Interface Design is a new area of research I have been exploring in the last week. Coined during a discussion with Scott, this term is an attempt to communicate the grounding for my research within the Design & Technology curriculum. I plan to demonstrate some aspects of this concept over the next week, but in the meantime, below are a few thoughts on the topic.

What is Social Interface Design?
A previous definition states that “a social interface is a critical point of intersection between different lifeworlds, social fields or levels of social organization, where social discontinuities based upon discrepancies in values, interests, knowledges and power, are most likely to be located”¹. In other words, a social interface serves a the connection between two or more agents – people, machines, or other entity – of unique discipline. Most other definitions follow the sentiment that this field is a subset of Human-Computer Interaction, as it is interested in the interface that connects people to machines or digital content. I see new opportunities in designing interfaces between people and other people, or between people and social networks (groups of people). This definition of Social Interface Design differs from its predecessors in that it is interested in the intersections between people, not the intersection between a person and computer. It is not Human-Computer Interaction, but Human-Human Interaction. Social interface designers create the conditions and environments that afford points of intersection, or collision (thank my colleague Steven J. Dale for that one), between actors in a system.

Why Social Interface Design is awesome
Categorizing my research and projects within this field allows me to apply the methods and terminology associated with other interface design concepts. User analytics, traffic, referrals, conversion data, and other concepts become fair game in Social Interface Design and allow me to communicate my findings in well known terms. These methods also lend themselves nicely to creating comparable, repeatable, and sustainable social systems, much in the same way an analytics dashboard can help design a successful web campaign.

1. Norman Long, Development Sociology: Actor Perspectives, Routledge, 2001, 243.

1. Abstract
2. Keywords/Domains
3. Introduction
1. (Grounding)
1. Intro to research and Research Questions

   What is my personal connection to this area of research? What opportunities have I identified and how am I approaching them?

2. Historical context (Industrial Revolution, Silicon Valley, Silicon Alley, Dot Com Crash, Economic Crash in 2008)

   I will briefly express the recent history of the economic and social conditions that have contributed to the current NYC startup ecosystem. What is unique about NYC in 2012, and how did we get here?

3. Millennial Generation and Students

   I will explain the attitudes and behaviors of Gen-Yers that make them exceptional candidates for entrepreneurship. Why are they itching to work for themselves? Why are they rebelling against the expectations set for them by older generations? What is unique about this generation, time, and context?

4. Current ecosystem (Education, Emerging business practices and platforms)
1. Education systems
1. curricula
2. faculty
3. student groups
4. events

This section will discuss the current conditions within typical collegiate systems. What is available to undergraduate and graduate students at universities in the US/NYC in terms of entrepreneurship? I will include unique systems and events that innovate in this realm, as well as opportunities for innovation within current systems.

2. Emerging business practices and platforms
1. Incubator programs
2. Co-working spaces
3. Online platforms
1. Kickstarter
2. Quirky
3. etc.

This section will discuss the current systems and platforms available to both university students and non-students in terms of business and product development. Where can one go and what can one consult in order to launch a business or product? What is innovative about these systems? What are their strengths and weaknesses? What opportunities are left to be explored?

4. Methodology
1. Process

   This will be an overview of the steps I went through in developing my research, prototypes, and project. I will talk about the modular process from first semester, as well as my personal thought process and timeline.

2. Prototypes

   This will be a walk-through of the development, evaluation, and iteration of each of my prototypes from September until April. I will also discuss user testing here.

5. Reflection
1. Metrics

   How did I plan on evaluating the efficacy of my findings? What metrics am I using to determine the success of my project? How am I proving or disproving my hypotheses?

2. Evaluation

   This will be a more detailed, applied explanation of the above metrics. What were my findings? Did I prove or disprove my hypotheses? Did I test the right things in my prototypes? How could I have done my research/project more effectively?

6. Conclusions
1. Research contribution (and why in Design & Tech?)
2. Forward movement in these methods
3. Thesis proved or disproved?

How can I summarize everything that I did over the past 9 months? What did I learn and how did I contribute to a bigger academic movement? What did I accomplish and what do I plan to accomplish moving forward if I could work on this research indefinitely?

[revised March 5, 2012]

DEBUT

Design and Entrepreneurship for Budding Urban-student Technologists

New York City is a thriving ecosystem of technology-related entrepreneurial endeavors, communities, and resources. The density of resources – universities, incubator programs, technology and business related events, libraries and free business-advice centers, startup companies, and venture capital firms – helps to foster and perpetuate the culture and growth of startup businesses. Undergraduate and graduate students working within the realm of design and technology have the potential to rejuvenate and reinvent struggling industries through design thinking and practice. With their Millennial ideals of autonomy from large companies, organizations, and governments, students in New York City are uniquely positioned to disrupt industries with their own products. This research explores how traditional and emerging business practices can empower the production of design students’ work.

The goal of this research is not necessarily to start businesses or to have students turn their work into profit. Instead, it aims to create and examine the conditions and environments necessary for the incubation of ideas. Many conditions contributed to the success of Silicon Valley in the late 1990s, the Dot Com crash in the early 2000s, the US economy crash in 2008, and the growth of Silicon Alley in the last five years. These economic booms and busts, as well as the history of industrial innovation, has lead to the current startup ecosystem in New York City and will probably help determine its future, as well. This research will help to identify both the strengths and weaknesses of the current startup industry in order to provide grounding for my own work, and to help to better position the outcome of my findings to be innovative within that system.

My project forms interdisciplinary student collaborations in New York City through a series of meet-ups. By bringing students together, I create and examine the conditions and environments that foster connections and successfully incubate ideas. The collaborations fostered to date have helped to build momentum for this project, and have already begun contributing to the development of a useful, sustainable system and practices that will hopefully lead to future collaboration between more student groups within this realm. It will be important to consider how I can rethink the structures and services at Parsons and other New York City institutions within this ecosystem to accommodate these practices.

As a coordinator and attendee of events within the NYC design and technology student community, I intend to develop a framework of innovative services for practice in future contexts and to document and explore the outcomes of these strategies in ethnographic reflection. Documentary photography and film are used to showcase the personalities and connections between each collaborator, as well as the environments from which these collaborators came and within which they practiced these collaborative strategies. Viewers will be able to explore each collaborator’s story in greater detail through layers of connected multimedia environments.

I spoke with Sarah this weekend about different techniques and styles I have been thinking about to present my ethnographic findings. She suggested I look into the work of Zoe Belloff, Peter Greenway, Brian McGrath, and Trinh T. Minh-ha, each of whom has created ethnographic works through very different means and media. Looking through these artists’ works as well as thinking about different mapping strategies helped me to move forward with some ideas.

Process

So, I mapped…
Sticky-note plotting

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