Student Design Challenge: Bodydata: Designing for the Qualities of the Quantified Self

A Response to the 2014 CHI Student Design Competition

"Self-tracking, self-management and self-awareness are activities that promote agency and transformation of our own growing accumulation of bodydata. How can we transform this overwhelming incoming bodydata into self-knowledge?" 

-Full Design Prompt

Overview

In response to the 2014 CHI Student Design Competition, our team designed a wearable, heads-up navigational system, 'Light the Way', that would allow firefighters to located others firefighters in near zero to zero visibility conditions when they are in trouble or non-responsive. By using an arduino combined with a row of LEDs, our design is able to display navigational directional and proximity. 

Proof of Concept

-Deliverable - 'Light the Way'

Reflection

'Light the Way' challenged me to step out of the roll as an interaction designer and into the roll of an interaction researcher. At the beginning of the process, I had to conduct interviews with firefighters, examine existing technologies that attempt to solve issues of navigation, and propose ideas on direction for the final design.

During this project, I operated as the team facilitator and kept everyone on-track and on-time with deliverables. By communicating with everyone on my team and applying design constraints, we were able to create a final design that many firefighters in Bloomington, Indiana are interested in.

Though we did not submit our design to the 2014 CHI student design challenge, we were the first group to every buildout a working prototype for our Interaction Design Principles class. I am proud of the fact that we explored how far we could take all the lessons we learned during our first semester and apply them to make an actual product we could user test.

Design