Class: ID 4062 Capstone Studio  |  Instructor: Roger Ball

Denizen is a beta mode of Google Maps that helps newcomers navigate their local areas. Personal navigation technology currently lacks the integration of individual human habits into it’s direction system. People are told to go distances they have no visual understanding of, given confusing and abrupt turns, and told to execute things they are personally uncomfortable with like rapid lane changes and heavy traffic. Especially with younger working professionals increasingly relocating to new and unfamiliar cities for work, having reliable and considerate navigation experiences becomes essential to the living experiences of many people.

This project explores what a navigation system based on human habits would look like, and how such a system can help people who have relocated to new and unfamiliar environments.

Current navigation tools rely heavily on computer judgment to relay directions to a user. For example, the computer decides what landmarks it will use to relay directions to you (ie. “Turn right at the traffic light”) By applying human-centered design principles, this new navigation system instead flips this power dynamic and gives a user more autonomy over how their directions are relayed to them by utilizing their understanding of landmarks, their comfort level on the road, and their familiarity with their environment to tailor directions. Rather than relying on cues which are difficult for humans to comprehend like predicting precise distances, this navigation uses cues that humans find easy to understand like locations they are familiar with to improve the navigation experience.

Team Member: Hansung Kim

Holla is an interactive screaming battle. Yell as loud as you can to shoot a beam of light from your mouth and defeat your opponent! Let off all your stress by screaming like never before. The rules of the game:

The game is played by 2 players.

Both players scream as loud as they can into the sound chambers until one completely fills all the LEDs with their color.

Screaming louder pushes a player's beam further towards the other side.

When the two beams meet, they push against each other and the movement is determined by the difference in the screaming volumes.

This project was completed as part of the HackGT Horizons hackathon. I had a lot of fun playing around with sensor components, building fun interactions, and watching people scream at each other.

Team Members: Jonathan Hatley

Bits of Good VMS is a web application that helps local Atlanta nonprofits manage their volunteers, and also helps volunteers manage their workload. From January to April 2020, I worked as a Product Designer at Bits of Good, a student-run non-profit that partners with local nonprofits to build them software solutions to help them more effectively reach their nonprofit goals.‍ Within Bits of Good, my team partnered with Hearts2Hearts Children’s Foundation, a nonprofit that raises funds to purchase educational and living supplies for orphans in China to help build a centralized volunteer management system for their nonprofit administrators and volunteers. I worked with one other product designer and a team of product managers, engineering managers, and engineers to build out a comprehensive and socially impactful solution.

I now lead the Product Design team at Bits of Good, but I thoroughly enjoyed getting to work with people outside of design during my time as a product designer. I realized the importance of not only creating a good experience for users, but also creating a good experience for team members of diverse backgrounds. As a designer, being able to engage in socially impactful work has been incredibly lifechanging, and I hope to continue to do social impact driven design in the future.