Shanshan Gao

Class of 2013

Projects

A Pig, a Bird, and a Mailbox

A Pig, A Bird, and A Mailbox is a series of metaphorical objects that you interact with to login to your everyday go-to websites and applications. The inspiration came from our experience teaching older adults about the internet, where sometimes even just opening a web browser, going to the right site, and remembering their login details is a daunting task. These simple objects aim to make this process more user-friendly.

The objects aim to simplify the login process by making it more tangible and adding sound as feedback. What once took four frustrating steps can now be accomplished in one delightful step. The pig opens your bank account, the mailbox opens your email, and the bird opens Twitter. We thought of many other functions but settled on these for their frequency of use. Although our inspiration came from older adults, younger people told us they could see themselves using this as well. We made our prototype with this mainstream audience in mind. The objects are made individually, but can be mixed, matched, and grouped together to form a suite — in this case, a farm setting.

The Timestamp is unassuming on the surface – an analog clock stamp that's meant to be used to physically and very consciously mark the start and end times of each task, giving you a constant source of accomplishment throughout the day.

Timestamp

Upon being asked to create something around the concept of Time, our group reflected upon the problems brought by our ever-increasingly fast-paced world. The stress that comes from our inability to concentrate and focus on a single task is a pervasive problem. In effect, those rare but golden moments of complete immersion, are harder and harder to come by. The question we asked ourselves was, "How could we, in essence, stop time?"

The Timestamp is unassuming on the surface—an analog clock stamp that's meant to be used to physically and very consciously mark the start and end times of each task, giving you a constant source of accomplishment throughout the day. But the power is in what's invisible to the eye—when used to start a task, it shuts down all your modern sources of distraction: social networks, email, instant messaging, mobile phones, and even your computer, allowing you to finally work in much-needed peace.

At the end of the task, the stamp is used to lift the freeze and bring everything back to normal. The stamp emits a red glow when busy and green when not to alert humans in the physical world of your current status.

KINSPIRE is a platform for busy parents to get ideas and inspirations from other parents, it a trigger for spontaneous moments of fun.

KINSPIRE

KINSPIRE is a platform for busy parents to get ideas and inspirations from other parents, it a trigger for spontaneous moments of fun.

Its smart filtering system parses through your child's profile, age and matches it with your time and resources, it even learns and remembers your preferences over time.

This model, consists of a first-order conversation system. It illustrates the current functioning of a physical bookstore.

Participative Selling System in Bookstores

It's no surprise why physical bookstores are struggling to survive these days with the rise of big online booksellers like Amazon. Bookstores are at a disadvantage due to having to pay rent, utility, employment  and other costs of being a physical bookstore. The lack of active participation, adaptive process, and local literary culture in bookstores, today lead to readers losing interest.

It has now become necessary to explore other way of making the bookstore a part of the community in a way that it provides more value than just selling books. This would be done through creating innovative services and relationships with readers by leveraging the physical environment of bookstore. Services that succeed in changing the perception of the bookstore from being a shop to the "third place"  after home and work.  Making it a public venue for civil debate, community engagement, pairing up people with similar interests, and even the experts with the novices. This model, consists of a  first-order conversation system. It illustrates the current functioning of a physical bookstore.

Primary and secondary research

Service Design for Young Working Parents

For busy working parents, who have limited time (energy, competence, mone,etc), X (service name) is a service that inspires parent to have fun, home activities with kids, alternatively it could become a converstation/joyful-time trigger for parents and kids. My gaol is to raise awareness and confidence for parents, help them build close emotional relationships. I will achieve this by intervening one on one time parent spending with their kids, such as feeding time, bath time and bedtime as well as showing several case studies from real parents.

The book becomes a way of preserving stories for everyone's enjoyment, and after a few years the family will have many chronologically tagged volumes stacked up in their bookshelf.

Prachi Pundeer

Prachi Pundeer

Prachi Pundeer

Prachi Pundeer

Awkward Family Game

In all cultures, families have interesting ways of preserving their stories. We designed a game meant to be played during a family get-together, where players test their knowledge about each other, and unravel and record new, curious and possibly embarrassing memories about each other.

The game is in the shape of a book which unfolds like an accordion into a long sheet of paper. The first player begins a story about any member, writes down a bit of the story, and passes the book around. Each player continues the story or contributes details to it, and if a player is not able to add to the story he must tell everyone an embarrassing anecdote about himself, which is also included in the book.

The book becomes a way of preserving stories for everyone's enjoyment, and after a few years the family will have many chronologically tagged volumes stacked up in their bookshelf.