EB_2017

The Frye Alaska Snow Boot

Self-designated “distinctly all-American” shoe and leather brand The Frye Company made its first foray into colder climates with the aptly-named “Alaska Lace Up Shearling Boot.” “Born in the wildernes

Challenge Half: Send News

For this challenge, I designed Send News, a picture and emoji centric news-source, centered around the idea of disseminating captivating content that would create it’s own virality by mimicking the wa

Challenge 1: The Washington Redskins and UberPOOL Present: One Nation, One Team

For this challenge, my response was inspired by the question I found most challenging: how do you get a variety of people to come to such a challenging experience, and how do you keep them coming back

What I’ve Got: Sweetgreen Promotion

I love this specific promotion, and others similar to it. The basic idea is after ordering online, you’re prompted with an option to share the sweetgreen app with your friends and in the process earn

What I’ve Got: Command Medium Designer Hooks

I love these little hooks for hanging hats, jackets, towels, and a variety of other common dorm room items. They’re super versatile and fairly subtle, but can clear up a lot of room and make use of sp

What I’ve Got: Ceiling Outlets

This isn’t the most beautiful classroom piece, but I love the concept and the flexibility it provides. Finding outlets is always such a challenge in classrooms, but having a few of these spread out ar

Challenge 3: The Money Tree

General App Outline: The Money Tree encourages young adults to invest in their futures by helping them visualize what their savings. Often the benefits of saving for retirement get lost in translatio

Challenge4: Dream Work

Dream Work is an online learning platform that eases young, talented veterans into the civilian world by teaching them the coding skills necessary to find high-quality tech jobs. While we are a learni

What I’ve Got: Live Feedback on Videos (startuppitchback.com)

This service is a fantastic way of giving valuable, multi-dimensional feedback on videos of any kind (this specfic use case is pitches, but could also be applicable to interview practice a la many of

Challenge 7 – VeRg: Erging with Virtual RealityVeRg makes erging fun and exciting through the use of VRStaying fit and healthy is a problem for everyone who lacks the discipline and motivation to work out. Our product also makes working out more enjoyable and more productive for those who may possess that discipline and motivation, but who do not enjoy their time working out (66% of those we surveyed found cardio exercise at the gym boring, and almost 90% of respondents do other activities while using cardio equipment). We want to make that time more accessible and fun. The people we surveyed listed playing a game (23%) and following a course (26%) as additions that would add the most value to their cardio exercise experience, making these options worth pursuing. For more serious rowers, we simply want to make erging and training more exciting, more competitive (through racing), and, ideally, more productive. This improvement in productivity is an empirically proven possibility: according to a recent overview of VR exercise research, Huang et al. find that “VR feedback actually enables anaerobic exercise for longer duration by reducing perceived exertion.” More impressively, these studies were done on significantly outdated VR equipment; as such, any improvement on 2008-era devices would be greatly magnified by the massive improvements in VR technology since before the Oculus Kickstarter. Moreover, studies suggest that connecting realistic video of any sort to an erg workout – let alone a VR experience – would dramatically improve the productivity of the workout by simultaneously decreasing the user’s perceived exertion level and increasing his or her overall power output.Our research shows that serious rowers and casual couch potatoes alike find working out (and specifically erging) quite boring. Virtual reality is the solution. When empirically examining VR’s effect on people’s psychological reactions to exercise, researchers found that “VR coupled with exercise enhanced enjoyment and energy while reducing tiredness.” Solving this problem matters because everyone wants to be healthy; ideally, they are, particularly since being healthy correlates with being happy. As such, at the most foundational level, people want to want to exercise. Unfortunately, motivational constraints that are functions of the technical antiquity of current fitness products makes this goal difficult to realize.We are starting in the relatively niche area of indoor rowing to show how VR can be used to make training and working out fun (and to increase the amount of working out that people do). The success of this one product can be extrapolated to the other products in the fitness space, which could mix VR with treadmills, bikes, stair machines, etc. to allow users to operate those products in other built-out virtual worlds.GamificationOne explanation for why working out is so difficult is that it occurs well beneath BJ Fogg’s “Action Line” as described in his Behavior Model, particularly because exercising is often characterized by extremely low ‘ability’ (it is hard to do). Moreover, while in the long term many people may feel they are motivated to hit the gym, at any given moment in time their motivation is fairly low, particularly when compared to other less strenuous activities. To remedy this situation and get people who hate working out to the gym, we use the benefits of VR as described above to slightly increase users’ ability (to recap, VR makes working out feel easier). More importantly, we heavily boost users’ motivation to use cardio machines by making these experiences gamified and social, in the process making them more fun and more distracting. With higher motivation and ability, we can then activate users via social, competitive triggers such as invites to race. To gamify the VR experience, we are using an endless runner model of game in which the faster you row in real life, the faster you move your virtual boat and the more rapidly you can collect coins and therefore points. This model of game can be played for any period of time, which gives users the flexibility and freedom to workout at their own pace and for their desired duration. By introducing coins, we hope to further distract users from the pain of their work out and instead use the machine as a tool to help them more quickly rack up points and place higher on the leaderboard.To introduce as many triggers as possible, we also hope to capitalize on the ultra-important social aspect of working out (which our survey takers were quite interested in and is one of a few proven ways of getting people to the gym). Previously separated individual rowers will now be able to race each other — regardless of whether they are friends or strangers with a common desire to compete. Short of real-time competition, users can also augment the competitive nature of their experience by racing against a virtual pace boat (moving at the speed of a principal competitor like the Yale eight-man or your own personal record, for instance). Experience

The screens we have presented here give a walkthrough of using a gamified VR experience. The first screen is the home screen of the game, after which we show scenes from an actual game. The participan

What I’ve Got: Ordering on an iPad at the Airport

In Laguardia Aiport this past weekend, I sat down to eat a quick meal in what is becoming a more standard way of ordering food in airports – via an iPad at your seat. The iPad contained all restaurant

Drone

What I’ve Got: Interactive Ads on Streaming Sites

I love these new interactive ad options that are popping up on sites to stream shows and movies. Rather than watching the traditional 2:30 of video, you can now opt in to interact with an ad for 30 se

What I’ve Got: New Ad Placement Opportunities in Online Streaming

This What I’ve got builds off of my last one, and is based again on how companies are successfully capitalizing on the shift towards online streaming rather than watching media on traditional TV. This

What I’ve Got: Beer Tap Handles

I was inspired to more closely examine the ways in which different breweries differentiate themselves on tap after Bryan Otis came in and spoke to us about the careful design efforts his team puts int

What I (Don’t) Got: Atrocious Channel Layout on Streaming Service

To complete my streaming trilogy, here is an example of the design of a streaming service gone horribly wrong. This is ESPN’s WatchESPN service, which allows viewers with the right subscriptions to st

Challenge 10: Competitive Landscape Write Up

Our goal for Challenge 10 is to iterate on a mobile app Artix that we designed to help friends share articles between different groups in the simplest way possible. We came up with this idea a few cha

Artixsplit

Artix

Lynxsplit

Lynx

Challenge 2A

helloevanbrownworld: 1) Logos: Decided to make my initials in a variety of ways 2) Icons: I’m working on a fitness-related startup so I decided to make a few icons similar to that. 3) Picture: I’m

The Frye Alaska Snow Boot

helloevanbrownworld: Self-designated “distinctly all-American” shoe and leather brand The Frye Company made its first foray into colder climates with the aptly-named “Alaska Lace Up Shearling Boot.”

What I’ve Got: Airport Shopping Layout Design

As I was meandering through Logan Airport this past weekend, I began to notice the strategic layout of the shops along the path from security to the gates. Not only was the layout quite interesting, b

What I’ve Got: Interactive Ads on Streaming Sites

helloevanbrownworld: I love these new interactive ad options that are popping up on sites to stream shows and movies. Rather than watching the traditional 2:30 of video, you can now opt in to interac

Challenge 10: Artix

For Challenge 10, we built Artix — an iOS app for sharing links with groups. We were inspired to build Artix after encountering the same problem over and over again: within different in-person convers