think carrie, think!

Yesterday at lunch, I made myself yet another salad from the salad bar in the cafeteria. My salads are getting boring, due to the fact that the options at the salad bar never really change beyond the occasional switch from parmesan to cheddar. But 1: the salads are way cheaper than anything else in the caf, 2: the salads taste way better than anything else in the caf, and 3: salads are generally good for you. So salad it was. But then I realized what ingredient was missing from the salad bar that would make my lunches so much better: avocado.

A member of the cafeteria staff came out to refill something at the hot bar. I realized this opportunity, and with a huge smile, went up and asked him if he had any avocados.

“I’m sorry, what?” he says.
“Avocados,” I replied, “for the salad bar.”
“Ohh. No, I don’t think so. But we have some in the back, I can get some for you.”
“No, it’s okay, if it’s too much trouble…”
“Of course not, let me run back and get some”.

He grabbed a bowl and headed back to the kitchen. A minute later, he reappears, half an avocado sliced and presented neatly in the bowl. “Avocado!” He smiles. I smile. And after thanking him a thousand times, I go on my merry way to eating my (yummy) lunch.

Now today, when I was making my salad for lunch, the same kitchen staff member came out to fix something at the hot bar… so naturally I asked him again if he had any of those avocados out back. He laughed and said of course, grabbed a bowl, and went back to the kitchen.

He reappeared with the bowl, this time with an entire avocado, still in shell, sitting in the bowl. He hands it to me, and says “One dollar. You still want it?” I laughed and took it. I wonder if he’ll give me an entire avocado tree tomorrow. More likely he won’t even be there tomorrow.

[in case anyone was wondering: avocado in Chinese translates literally to 'butter fruit']

Today at work we had a couple different roundtable discussion sessions with some HR staff. The point of these discussions was to give feedback about our internship experience at IBM. I had some major problems with the way these discussions were run, but anyway…

I mentioned that my idea of IBM Research as a corporation was still very technical – there is very little room for exploring and introducing new methods and ways of thinking. Granted, there is a lot of room for freedom in doing whatever you want in terms of a project and I am grateful for that. But thinking back, all the job offers I received for this summer were similar in that respect, surprisingly – either way, I would have been given my own project and space to innovate. The reason why I chose IBM Research over other companies was because I knew IBM would benefit most from the addition of design thinking (especially since I would not be working at the IBM Research Cambridge site).

So now that my internship is nearing its end, I am still asking myself whether what I’ve been doing will really have an impact on IBM. But most of all, I am asking myself what my role is as an individual designer, contributing to a corporation such as IBM. Is it in my place to try and change old ways of thinking? Or should we wait for other up-and-coming companies to show IBM why new ways of thinking are beneficial? Or is IBM so large that it doesn’t matter what other people say and/or do?

Not so much work related

After Sprint made it into the news this past Tuesday, it comes as no surprise that a flurry of articles about customer service surfaced quickly after. All the more research material for me, I guess. Amongst the articles I found MeasuredUp, a site dedicated to customer reviews on customer service and brand experience (although I wonder why they split those two entities up). Apparently many businesses, after reading some of the reviews, have been proactively fixing some of their problems.

If only there were better service quality metrics. Yet another topic I have started thinking and reading about but have had no time to fully explore.

While I’m on the topic of customer experience… here’s a pretty amusing clip of a classic customer service example. It’s Ed Horrell calling Northwest Airlines, wondering why flight attendants get testy when you don’t have the exact change for a cocktail:

A little more work related

Mary Jo Bitner is coming to give a talk tomorrow, concerning her research on self-service technologies. It’ll be interesting to hear why she’s pushing this idea so much, considering the fact that the majority of the services world considers self-service technology to be the reason why customer service is going down the drain.

I am lucky that my mentor is the one organizing her visit. I will get to have lunch with her and Mary Jo, and will have some time to show Mary Jo some of the work I’ve been doing here at IBM. Should be pretty good, getting some feedback from a leader and founder of services marketing.

This past Friday, I sat in on one of our weekly Stanford Video Seminar series. They’re basically seminars given by various people invited by Stanford, and broadcast online. Someone in our building thought it would be neat to bring some design spice into this IBM computer science mix (thank goodness), so every Friday, he reserves a room and plays a seminar on some design topic.

So the video lecture I sat in on was entitled “Designing Interfaces for Musical Experience”. It was given by CMU’s very own Tina Blaine (from the ETC). While I learned nothing new from the lecture, she had an exhaustive list of neat musical interface examples covering various domains (single user, multi-player, etc).

Even though I didn’t learn anything new in terms of musical interfaces, some interesting things were brought up and worth thinking about, even if not in the realm of music:

• How does one design for multi-player environments? More specifically, how do you make sure players know the impact they’re having on the environment? If you’re one of 100 involved in an interactive piece, how do you know if your actions are actually having an effect?
• How do you engage interaction and experience in a public space? Thinkwell Design & Production’s The Show (at The Pier at Caesars in Atlantic City) does a great job of this. They’re famous for an intense, five minute fountain show, but when the show isn’t in progress, the fountain becomes an “operator free, interactive” fountain. A fountain that plays games with people, how cool is that. An example of one of the games is Paint the Fountain: “When guests step into a spot of colored light on the floor, the fountain changes to that color and shoots into the air. The more people clustered in the colored light, the taller the fountain plumes. When all the colored light zones reach their maximum, a quick show payoff is performed.” Simple, but it does the trick.

And a partial list of some of the more interesting of her musical interface examples:

Pandora [not so much the music engine, but the Music Genome Project is what's interesting here]
MusicLens [a very neat, though not thorough, way to visualize and search music by type]
GlassEngine [this wasn't mentioned in the talk, but it's related to MusicLens - another great way to search music by type. and a shamless plug for IBM]
DigiWall [an interactive climbing wall using lights and sounds]
Midiball [a "showtoy": a five foot floating balloon with midi triggers, used to get a concert audience to make music by throwing it around]
BeatBugs [cute, handheld percussive instruments, can connect to a network to form a social group of BeatBugs]
AudioPad [a composition and performance instrument, tracking objects on a table for output]
Music Table
Electroplankton [an interactive music and art video game made for the Nintendo DS. Not so much a game as a demonstration of the power of the built-in microphone and the touchscreen of the DS]
PLORK (Princeton Laptop Orchestra)

Mark Podlaseck lent me his copy of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, as a way to inspire me on different notation techniques for my work (and it’s just a great book in general). I’ve skimmed a bit of it and already can’t put it down. There are some interesting things I can take away from it in regards to my own work, particularly about how comics handle the sequence of time. How can we use 2D space to successfully simulate moments and time slots when we’re trying to explain a story (or in my case, a service engagement)? Also interesting and somewhat relevant to my upcoming thesis: how can emotions and senses be represented in a single image?

Another book to add to my Amazon.com wishlist.

Wait, didn’t I just write a post telling myself I need to learn how to focus?

*EDIT: a friend had just reminded me that Scott McCloud came to speak at CMU last year. And, as I told him, they really need to educate the first years with some sort of reading list before they get to CMU. That way those of us new to the field are at least somewhat in the know before we get to school. hmm.