>> Hello. Hello!
[CHEERS AND APPLAUSE]
Welcome. Welcome to the Design Expo 2015. In case you're wondering about the
slide show that was going as you guys were arriving, this was an inclusive
visual identity that we came up with. It was a joint effort here at Microsoft
and outside. We created the main symbol that you can see in color, and we asked
other people to reinterpret that symbol, which is a capital letter D in a way
that it represents inclusive design. So that's what you were looking at. And
this event is public, open to the public. So feel free to tweet. If you tweet,
use the #Dexpo15, which is our hashtag for this event. I was the first one to
use it so please fill that up. So starting with just a bit of feedback about
background about this. There's been so much feedback. Kind of getting out of
that mode. Background about Design Expo: It's about identifying some key
challenges that the world is facing, and giving them out to top design schools
around the world and see how they interpret the problem. And another goal is to
enhance long-term relationships across the schools and between Microsoft and the
schools. We had a couple success stories from the past when a couple schools
met in here, Design Expo Brazilian school and school from the Netherlands, and
they started an exchange program. We also had one of our Design Expo alums go
found a company which happened to be Foursquare. So he passed through this room
just like you guys. So we like to foster this community with Microsoft and also
across the schools. And this is the 12th year we're doing Design Expo. So been
doing this for a while. So the process, we started the end of the year, we
started by selecting the topic and then we select a set of schools and it's
usually eight schools worldwide and we rotate through the schools and then we
assign Microsoft liaisons which are people who travel to the schools to meet
with them and give them feedback throughout the process. And each school starts
a semester-long course on the project, and then the liaison goes back to the
school to select the final project that is here. So you guys, if you're here,
it's because you're a winner. So be happy for yourselves and you made it and
we're super happy to see what you have.
[applause]
And today's the day they present, and they present for eight minutes and then
get feedback from the amazing critics here. The design challenges here is
inclusive design, and in 2014 the World Health Organization has radically
revised their definition of disability. They're defining it as contextdependent condition versus an attribute of the person. So in this way of
looking at disability makes us realize that we all go through disabilities
throughout our days and throughout our lives from being in the sun and not being
able to see my screen to being somewhere where it's really noisy and not being
able to hear or when I'm driving I am cognitively disabled and visually impaired
when I'm doing that task. So we ask the students to look at a spectrum from
permanent disability to temporary to situational. An example of permanent would
be somebody who amputated their arm to a temporary case which is a new parent
who has to do everything one handed because they're holding a baby on the other
hand, to -- I blanked -- to, yeah, to a situation when you have a broken arm,
for instance. Or when you're carrying groceries outside the store. Just to say
that it happens throughout our days and throughout our lives. And we think that
by designing for the one percent, we end up benefitting everybody. So just
think it's a good design process. These are our participating schools: We have
Pontifical Catholic University from Rio, Brazil; University of Applied Sciences
Potsdam, Germany; Carnegie Mellon University from the U.S.; Korea Advanced
Institute of Science and Technology, KAIST, from Korea. Both KAIST and Korea,
it's their first year doing Design Expo. We have Delft University of Technology
from the Netherlands. And NYU Shanghai Program. Art Center College of Design.
And our neighbors, University of Washington.
[Applause]
We have amazing critics sitting right here in front of you, and I will go ahead
and introduce them. I hope you like the pictures I picked for you guys. It was
on the Web, so I feel -- so Rob Girling is co-founder of a local design and
innovation firm Artefact. His career started at Apple in 1991 and 1992, when he
won the Apple Student Interface Design competition for concepts around mobile
and personal computing. Rob then joined Microsoft for ten years. He started at
the Office team. He then worked in games and eventually became the design
manager responsible for the user experience and branding for Windows XP. He
worked briefly on Vista before going to join IDO as senior interaction designer.
And at IDO is when he decided he should go found Artefact and he founded
Artefact which has been around for almost ten years now. And prior to founding
Artefact Rob worked at Sony Computer Entertainment of America. Thank you, Rob.
We're very happy to have you.
[Applause]
Our next critic is Angelo Sotira, who has met the Grumpy Cat in person. So we
can get his autograph later. Angelo is an American entrepreneur and co-founder
of the online community Deviant Art that most of you probably know about. And
Deviant Art is a social network for artists and art enthusiasts and a platform
for emerging and established artists who publish, promote and share the work
with an enthusiastic artistic community. Deviant Art has over 32 million
registered users and it attracts over 65 million unique visitors per month. The
community members upload over 160,000 pieces of artwork every day.
Angelo co-founded Deviant Art at 19 years old. It was not his first company.
He founded another company four years earlier, when he was still a baby, music
file sharing site called Dimension Music, and he sold it in 1999 before starting
Deviant Art. Thank you, Angelo.
[Applause]
I forgot to say he was born in Greece, and he's an Aquarian like myself. Next
we have Wendy March, senior designer for Intel's New Devices Group. You're not
for the New Devices Group? Is that not you? Okay. That's what was on your
website. What's your role? [indiscernible]
Experience manager for Intel's New Devices Group. Her current work focuses on
speech interfaces and new form of interactions with physical devices. She has
also led projects that explore new forms of interaction with mobile devices that
are enabled by sensors, which happen to be the topic of last year's Design Expo.
And advanced imaging technologies, especially new types of gaming. She also led
projects that included reimagining the mass robots, future of smart streets and
how the design of digital money can reflect our social values. Wendy has an MA
in computer-related design from the Royal College of Art in London which has
participated in Design Expo, this school, and a master of science in information
systems from the University of Brighton. Prior to working at Intel, Wendy also
worked at IDO and also interned at Apple in her early career. Thank you, Wendy,
for being here.
[Applause]
I want to give special thanks to our veteran, Mike Kasprow. Mike is just over
here. He's our honorary critic. He's been helping students present better and
giving them creative feedback for the last nine years of Design Expo. And Mike
is now a senior vice president and executive creative director at Proximity in
Toronto, Canada. I learned that Toronto, Canada was voted the best city for
five years in a row. And Mike has a spare bedroom. [Laughter]
[Applause]
And thank you to the liaisons and thank you to [indiscernible] for coming up
with the visual identity and the whole visual identity team. Thank you.
[Applause]
We're ready to start with our first team, Rio de Janeiro, Pontifical Catholic
University, with MESH, reliving memories emotions and impressions.
[Applause]
>> Hello. First of all, it's a huge pleasure to be here today. We are from
Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. And my name is
Patricia and these are my team colleagues -- Edy, Jessica and Raphael. We are
here today to present our project which is focused on the visually impaired. So
there are about 285 million people visually impaired worldwide, and according to
the World Health Organization, there are, sorry, there are four levels of visual
acuity that goes from normal vision to blindness. We decided first to focus on
the three last levels to interview. So our first conclusions were that -sorry, first you ask who are they, what do they like to do, which challenges do
they face? And our first conclusions were there's some subjects that came up
like they talk about their feelings, about where do they like to travel to, how
they interact with people and there was this particular subject that was memory.
We talked with Aliny. Here's Aliny. She's a girl with severe visual
impairments. And she has the habit of keeping a journal. Actually, she blogs.
So she likes to share her experiences and feelings online and talk to -- share
with people. And then we started talking about memory also with the other
interviewers and they talk about storytelling and relating memories to events
and places. So realize a strong connection between people and they're recalling
past expenses.
>> Among these statements we found three of them, three quotes that were
interesting for us to work with. So like most of the tools to keep memory rely
on vision. My memory is like a photo album to me. Data power means nothing to
me. The most important is what I've done there.
So those three phrases show us that memories are related to places and events
and that for fully sighted people, they realize visual aspects such as
photography and video. And how about the vision impaired? They don't have
this. They don't realize the visual aspects. But they still have the
connections between places, events and their moments. That's the point.
There's so much more to memory than only visual aspects.
>> So what about you guys, what do you do to remember, what is memory to you?
We have a lot of ways of keeping memory on a daily basis. For instance, when
you check in your favorite restaurant or when you go out to somewhere special
and you check in on social media, the bottom line is remembering is our way of
treasuring our past. That's why we created MESH, the memory sharing. MESH is a
system that allows users to capture, relive and share memories through a
wearable device using an online platform. With MESH you can capture, relive
sensations and you share and discovery memories to and from others.
>> But how do you capture a memory? Well, every interaction done with MESH
service is done by this little device here. And for you to capture a memory you
just need to tap on the bottom of the device, and for doing that all the
information will be recorded by the microphone here. The temperature of your
skin will be recorded in the back of your ear and there will be a sensor. Here
the user's temples will record the heartbeat. All of the representation of this
memory will also be done by this device in the same trip, three parts. And for
reliving the memory you just need to associate using those three characteristics
-- the name of the user that recorded this memory, the place that it was
recorded, and the date it was recorded. By instance I'll show just like -- you
just have to tap here and say relive my memory on April 15th, 2012, in Rio de
Janeiro. And if you're not looking for any specific memory and you want to
search for something interesting, you just have to tap it here again and say
relive memories randomly, and then walk around looking for memories that will
astonish you. But every memory by default is only personal and private. And
you need to share it or make it public for other people. And you can do that by
two things. You can share directly to someone's MESH or you can use a social
network such as Facebook and Twitter. You just need, when you record a memory
or just relive them, you tap and say share on my Facebook and then tag your
friends such as tag Maria Bonelli.
>> So you might be wondering for whom MESH was designed for.
everyone with different levels of visual acuity.
[Music]
>> My love I miss you a lot.
language]
By all means, for
I wish you could be here with me.
[Foreign
>> Wow. You're the best thing I have in my life.
[Music]
[Heartbeat]
>> Thank you.
[Applause]
THE MODERATOR:
Rob?
Thank you.
Now off to the judge's comments.
Want to start,
>> Sure. What a commendable job, guys. As you saw, I'm cheating a little,
because I saw the presentation on Monday and we had some concerns with the way
it was presented. And you guys have totally addressed all of that and then
some, and totally nailed the timing and you've done a great job. So
congratulations on that component of this, which is an important component,
right, the storytelling of your method and process. I'm really struck by the
power of the video to convey the idea. I think the simple voice user
interaction for recall based on place and voice key phrases is probably a pretty
good start at the UI. There's going to be some challenges there on that April
12th day in 2012. There was quite a lot of activity, and trying to sort of
disseminate between different types of activities could be quite challenging.
But I think it's a commendably simple user experience at least at this level.
And I think the form factor as well deserves some nice -- it's very discrete.
It actually looks quite fashionable. There's the nice wearable kind of
aesthetic to it. And so I just wanted to congratulate you guys on a job well
done in communicating the power of your idea in a quite challenging space. So
well done.
>> I really agree with that feedback. I really like the result. Like I love
the way that you ultimately post this to Facebook and you have a visualization
of the experience and that little kind of heartbeat piece. I think the more you
guys expand on that piece and that resulting product, the more you'll drive
people to want to engage in that behavior. So that's really, really emotional
and really, really, like, human and really great. So I think that will
transcend nicely in social spaces. I'm not so sure about kind of the hardware
components or the wearable components. I think you've done a phenomenal job
with it so far, and I look forward to seeing you guys progress on the hardware
piece. So, yeah, terrific.
>>
Thank you.
>> Well done. I have worked on something that goes around your ear. It's
really hard getting things to fit people's ears. So I think that was nice.
Very kind of simple and you thought about that. I thought it was a very
interesting space to think about, as you say most memory-related things tend to
be visual. Although people have for centuries written novels and journals. But
it's an incredibly important thing for people. So I think that was a very
interesting space to focus on. I would have liked to have seen a little more
prototyping happening. I think to understand both what you're capturing and
then the prototyping of kind of playing it back and kind of having some sort of
showing that, you know, this is how people felt about it and this is how it
worked and this is what a memory was made of. I think that would have been
really an important part. So I think for another project that kind of bringing
that out would be really important. Very nice. Thank you. They're all
terrified of being over time.
[Applause]
>> Okay, we have three minutes for questions, but you guys should switch. I
mean, the next team should start coming and we'll open for questions. Phil?
I'll repeat the question.
>>
[indiscernible]
>> So the question is -- I need to repeat the question for folks on the video - that you guys talked about recording sound but ambient sound is another great
thing to be recorded. Have you included that?
>> Yes, we have. We decided to cut this from the presentation because in terms
of time but we had two devices, and each one of them will have one microphone.
So we used kind of binaural sound capturing for environmental sound recording.
It was in the process of the project but we decided to cut it off because it was
not the focus of the user experience.
>> Any more questions from the audience? Yes, in the back, two in the back.
What's the length of the recording? What's the length, the duration?
>> Hi. We didn't really decide for a length, but it should have the -- yeah,
but you can record forever because you can forget that the device is on and it's
going to be recording everything. So, yeah, we had to decide on length, and
that's a good idea. Thank you.
[Applause]