Listen to hear more about where I study at NYU ITP.

Wish us luck!

SocialDrinkster will be debuting tomorrow! What is SocialDrinkster? So glad you asked!
“SocialDrinkster is about free alerts for free things. Pass freebies to your friends. On The Go,On Your Phone.”

People like free things. People like to be social.
Businesses can attract flocks of people to test products or fill the room up.
As a mobile app, you get alerts on-the-go. You can check your email, surf the news, and still get a SocialDrinkster alert clueing you in to a bar’s free drink offer, restaurant’s free tapas offer, etc.”
A friendly mobile app developed by Cindy Wong + Brian E Jones in New York City at NYU ITP.

See Brian E  Jones and I at the NYU ITP Spring Show 2010!

Sunday, May 9, 2-6pm & Monday, May 10, 5-9pm
ITP @ 721 Broadway, 4th Floor
New York, NY 10003

FarmBridge: Building Communities Around Local Food

We won the Design Expo 2010 challenge for NYU! Here’s my long-due documentation about my 12-week coursework for ITP’s Design Expo course, taught by Prof. Nancy Herchinger.

What is Design Expo?

“Microsoft is providing a forum around the theme “Service meets Social” to showcase exceptional design process and ideas.  As part of a semester long course, students are asked to form interdisciplinary teams of 2-4 students to design a user experience prototype .Students will research a design problem which is related to the theme this year, define a scenario, ideate design solutions, select one idea to prototype, and study the impact on real users.”

Team’s Response to “Service meets Social”

FarmBridge: Building Communities Around Local Food. As a team, we came to the realization that as New Yorkers, we are passionate about food and our local neighborhoods.  However, New York City is a city of extreme income disparity  where  entire communities do not have access to the kind of fresh, healthy that we care so much about. Our solution became FarmBridge.  We want to create an online platform that makes it easier for neighbors to form groups and gain access to locally farmed food.

Local Food Movement: What’s Our Cause?

For a user audience, we decided to focus on community supported agriculture groups (CSAs). These are local neighborhood communities that band together to buy directly from area farmers. So, why CSAs? Why not farmers’ markets, mail-order, or whatnot? See below:

1) Grassroots approach to the problems that the local food movement aims to address.

2)Our research points to at tremendous demand from within community.

3) Model most able to get good food to people who live beyond just the wealthier neighborhoods in the city.

User Needs + User Research:

These communities are facing demand that is quickly outpacing their logistical/administrative capabilities. Each community handles their own administrative/logistical setup in different ways (pen/paper, Excel, Google Docs, email, Ning, etc) and are dependent on volunteer core managers who deal with membership setup, farmers, budgeting, etc. They all go through the same iterative processes but resources are rarely shared (that is starting to change but is happening slowly on an ad-hoc basis).  These methods may be fine for a small-scale setup but what happens when demand skyrockets? How do you let success not lead to your community’s failure? Ex: You had 50 people in your membership but the following year, you have 200, 300 people showing up at your neighborhood pickup spot?  How do you make sure that your community group can handle volunteer changes, vendor changes, etc. without disrupting your membership? How do you offer the same close-knit, social community feel that CSAs inspire within an online space but w/o that sterile, anonymous feel?

We attended a New York City conference for local food organizers and communities, spoke to over a dozen organizers, volunteer coordinators, and members. After listening to this specific community, we figured out our audience and how we could provide a service to them.

User Audience:

We are going to provide CSA managers with the tools they need to run these communities. Furthermore, for members, we want to emulate the same neighborhood feel that these communities inspire in real life by offering a social space for them online.

Design Prototypes

With our presentation – we delivered a clean vision of what we wanted. We wanted to offer easy, friendly way for these communities to self-organize and manage themselves. We also wanted a warm, inviting design for which members felt compelled to share content and communicate each other online in valuable ways. We hope that with our designed platform we can help this movement grow. For further documentation, please visit teammate, Julio Terra and his excellent documentation.

Now what?

From each school, a representative team from each school (ahem, us!) will be featured in a presentation at the 2010 Microsoft Faculty Summit July 12-13, 2010 in Redmond, Washington. “The Design Expo creates a forum for encouraging “out of the box” thinking, by exploring students’ visions for the future of computing as well as honing their presentation skills.”

“If you’re gonna cry, you better code and cry.”

– Cindy Wong

In tackling mobile development, I’ve partnered up with my classmate, Brian E. Jones, in making an Android app that offers social freebies on the go. We’ve initially decided on the name, SocialCoupon, but may move on to something more specific to the nightlife freebies we’re eyeballing (bar drinks, tapas, etc).

Why the Idea is Attractive
People like free things. People like to do social things. People especially like passing freebies to friends.
Businesses can attract flocks of people to test products or fill the room up. As an Android app, you get alerts without needing the app running actively. You can check your email, surf the news, and still get a SocialCoupon alert clueing you in to a bar’s free drink offer or restaurant’s free tapas offer.

What’s Required

Android App Interface: Design/Functions

Vendor Submission Interface

QR Code Generator (looking at Google)

MySQL database to track vendor, user, QR info

Playing around in Android’s PhoneGap with StreetSnaps, my street fashion photography app. Last time, we tried JQTouch. This time, I played with PhoneGap, using Android’s features.So far, you can (supposedly) access Android’s camera, view the photography available via neighborhoods (East Village, Brooklyn), email, and view the StreetSnaps Gallery (via JQTouch interface directly).

Since we’ve started studying developing web mobile apps in my Mobile Media class, I am increasingly reminded how design can lead to better implementation/functionality and vice versa. It’s way too easy to rush into programming and curse yourself at the half-way mark, saying, “If I’d sat down earlier and really thought about my application, I would never have designed it this way. ”  Too often at ITP, I feel like we’re in such a rush to program, we often forget to take some time to sketch, wireframe an idea, study the interaction to make sure its effective and clear before implementing. After doing some rough research on mobile app interfaces, I came across  Web Design Inspiration for the iPhone which shed some visual light on what works, etc. for this tiny screen platform.

For my mobile media midterm, I choose to focus on developing my street photography site, StreetSnaps. StreetSnaps lets mobile users to snapshoot stylish people on the street, upload from their mobile phones or cameras, and see the results of what have been posted online. Peruse through different neighborhoods to see the different looks for each New York neighborhood listed.

Design: StreetSnaps sports two designs, one made specifically for web browsers and for iPhones/Android web-kit enabled browsers. The web interface takes advantage of horizontal scrolling to allow a photographic touch that lets users scroll as if viewing a camera roll. The mobile web interface utilizes JQTouch to create a “mobile-app feel” and utilizes vertical scrolling.

The PHP script in StreetSnaps will auto-detect whether the user is using an iPhone, iPod Touch, or Google Android  phone to forward them directly to my designed mobile site.

So, Microsoft’s 2010 Design Expo Challenge is “Service Meets Social” and ITP is ready to tackle that amorphous concept now that Prof. Nancy Herchinger has finalized our teams. My teammates, Julio Terra, Noah Waxman, Tianwei Liu, and I tussled with the ideas of household savings management for families versus making environmentally food accessible to urban dwellers. How can technology aid either need? What serves as a greater impact? Food for thought (pun intended).

After much discussion, my teammates and I  are looking at the issue of making local, environmentally friendly food available to urban dwellers. Essentially, we’d like to strengthen the community of local farmers to local customers for those of us who would like to see better bulk buying power, accessibility, etc. then what is currently accessible (local bodega, super market, farmer’s market, Whole Foods, FreshDirect.com, etc). New York City has a very strong network of CSAs and Farmer’s Market and we hope that we can make local agriculture even stronger by expanding the options for where local farmers can market their wares (directly to consumers) with the convenience of online technology. As Noah said: “Let’s empower local farmers to retail their own produce while giving urban-dwellers a greater sense of connection to the food they eat.”

We’ll be doing investigations and interviews with farmers, current networks between consumers/local farmers, profiling produce selection at various locations, among others for the next weeks ahead. Let’s just say: Google Wave will be our very close friends while we’re coordinating this.