IDEO Labs

Test-driving the usability of a food-tech startup’s new API.

When the Food Genius team moved into an empty project space at IDEO Chicago to become our first Startup-in-Residence, we were cautiously optimistic. This co-locate-with-startups thing was new to both of us. Would they like us? Would we like them? It was like meeting our first college roommate all over again, only this one had a complex algorithm that tracked and classified more than 14 million restaurant menu items. Swoon! We love nerds who design with data.

Fresh from Excelerate Labs’ 2011 Summer Program, an intensive accelerator for startups where some IDEOers were acting as mentors, the Food Genius team had just decided to pivot from being a consumer-facing mobile app provider—a so-called “Netflix for Foodies”—to being an API provider focused on customers in the food industry and app development worlds. Their mission: serve up real-time data to industry insiders hungry to get ahead of food trends. Their key ingredients: food-related data from Facebook, Twitter, Yelp!, and other social web services—information like people’s favorite dishes, trendy new ingredients, and red-hot flavor pairings.

For 14 weeks, the Food Genius team worked around the clock developing their API and an industry-facing trends dashboard with the help of our digital and interaction designers. The goal was to launch an API that both developers and food industry insiders would love as quickly as possible. Yikes! Less bacon! More programming!

As Food Genius’ “graduation” date grew closer, and their API more robust, we started brainstorming ways they could highlight the capabilities of their API. What started out as a simple data visualization of all the places to get curry in Chicago, soon ballooned into a 12-person, three-hour, live-tweeting Curry Crawl to find the best curry in the city by using the Food Genius API.

To prepare, we tricked out the back of a U-Haul to look like a mobile Indian restaurant with yards of fabric and cans of Super 77, while Food Genius created a custom mobile app. As a vintage jam box pumped psychedelic Indian funk, the team piled into the back of the truck and “fed” the API our taste preferences. (Justin Massa, CEO of Food Genius, dressed up like a “server” (get it?) to personify the API.) First stop: Mughal India! We ate the dishes suggested. Voted. Tweeted. The API served up new suggestions. Four restaurants, a couple miles, and nine curries later, we had a clear favorite: the Chicken Makhani at Jaipur. (You can read an archive of our Tweets here.)

After our quest (and a few bottles of Goo Gone) we returned the U-Haul to its natural state and moved on to new adventures. Luckily, our talented in-house filmmaker Adam Geremia created the awesome video at the top of this post, best watched with the volume cranked to 11.

Mixing makers, hackers, designers, and OpenIDEOers in IDEO’s London studio

Way back in December, some of us in the IDEO London studio started talking in a pub about some of the ideas arising out of OpenIDEO and its challenges for social good.

We wondered: How could we help the digital community build out more of these winning tech and design solutions? What would happen if we got passionate designers, hackers, and digital community members in a room with no distractions one weekend, all working towards creating physical & digital prototypes for social good? And, could we all play around with Arduino and the 3-D printer while we were at it?

Originally we thought of doing a hackathon. Then we decided to push the concept to its next iteration. How could we bring together multidisciplinary weekend project teams—not just software engineers and digital designers, but also industrial designers, architects, and problem solvers from different backgrounds? Could we create a new kind of design-driven collaborative event? Inspired by IDEO’s own maker culture, the DIY community at Maker Faire, and Silicon Valley hackathons, we decided to experiment with the concept. We called this prototype event a “Make-a-thon.”

The result was a unique London pop-up event that produced some truly original concepts and meaningful digital and physical prototypes. We hosted about 60 makers and hackers in the IDEO London studio—including 1/3 IDEOers and 2/3 UK creative community members. We used EventBrite to keep track of invitations and had a waiting list of about 65 people. Here’s what we made in a 1.5 days—and what we learned.

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If you create something with Arduino and put it out into the world, there is no well-established link to the source. If you personally made the device, the source can get lost over time. If you didn’t create it, you could have a tough time tracking the source down. You have the physical device, why can’t it tell you where it’s code lives?

I made a tool for Arduino called “Upload-And-Retrieve-Source” that for the most part solves this problem.

Github page here, direct download link here

For background on the project and details on how it works click through to the full article.

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The Interaction Design and Digital community in the Bay Area has been regularly getting together after hours to inspire and learn from each other. It’s a time to play, build and be inspired. But most of all, it’s a time to have fun with friends.

Our own Amid Moradganjeh filmed and assembled a video which captures and  communicates the mood of one of our Hack Nights really well. As some of these projects evolve, we look forward to sharing them with you!

A couple of weeks ago I happened to get an email from a professor at Shizuoka University named Yoichi Nagashima. Five of his students formed “Revolution-J” where they have created five prepared Jaminators hacked with Arduinos, connected to Max/MSP patches.

Their detailed build log is in Japanese, but you can still get a basic idea of what they have done. Better yet they published all of their schematics and code.

I figured I should re-blog this because not only is it a cool open source project, but the Jaminator was an IDEO designed toy guitar / drum set from 1992. I’d say it basically is the full embodiment of the word “rad” as is confirmed in the press photo after the jump:

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For halloween, each IDEO location held a one-hour pumpkin carving competition. I thought it would be interesting to see how much tech I could jam into a pumpkin within the time limit. Luckily, I had an old pneumatics kit under my desk and recently stumbled upon an incredibly simple way to get my iPhone to talk to Arduino. I was able to conceptualize, build, and program this wirelessly-controlled-pneumatic-eye-popping pumpkin in just over an hour, barely missing the deadline but experiencing how powerful these low fidelity prototyping tools could be.

Learn more after the jump…

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Every fall the San Francisco chapter of AIGA, the professional association for design, hosts a gala to celebrate a community of over 1,600 students and professionals in the Bay Area under the umbrella of communication design, ranging from graphic design to interactive design and experience design. Each gala has a theme that is most evidently expressed through the auctioning of custom-designed objects by design firms and independents. This year’s event was a masquerade, and appropriately titled “Mask Appeal.”

IDEO was asked to participate again this year, so, of course, we took up the challenge. It didn’t take much convincing to recruit fellow communication designer Wilfred Castillo to help imagine what a contribution from IDEO could be. After a week of remotely brainstorming how to transform a $3 mask structure into something awesome, we finally landed on the concept of a wooden toy maze. It’s interactive, nostalgic and who didn’t love this game as a kid?

Click through for more photos and build details.

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At the beginning of the summer, our intern cohort was told that IDEO has a history of summer pranks.  Inspired, we got together, threw around a few ideas, and settled on building a musical staircase, one that would play different sounds when you walk up and down the steps.

Over the course of three weeks, we brainstormed and prototyped a variety of implementations and consequently took over the Toy Lab over the weekends to build, solder, and assemble.  We tried to be stealthy and keep the project a secret, though it soon became clear that designers in the Toy Lab had been thinking about building something similar for a few years.

Click through for build details and source files for building your own!

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Watch the first chapter.

The process of making one or hundreds of Illustrator files pixel perfect is a pain in the arse, so here are a few tips to put ointment on that owie. For digital screen based design, I highly suggest using Photoshop or Fireworks over Illustrator. However, there are times when you have no choice but to use Illustrator…and that’s what these tips are for.

1) Move selected items to whole pixels
I created an Illustrator script for moving selected items to the nearest whole pixel (top / left).
Download the script: MoveItemsToNearestPixel.jsx

To install, move the script to your Illustrator scripts folder:
OS X: Applications/Adobe Illustrator CS5/Presets/en_US/Scripts
Windows: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Illustrator CS5\Presets\Scripts

2) Make selected items look like they are on whole pixels
Select any or all items you want to look like are on whole pixels and check the Align to Pixel Grid checkbox in the Transform Panel (Shift + F8). This makes things look like they are on whole pixels, even though they might not be.

3) Set up your grids
— Open Illustrator Preferences/Units and set everything to pixels
— Open Illustrator Preferences/Grids & Guides and set Gridlines every to 10 px and Subdivisions to 10
— Enable grid snapping (Command + Shift + “)
— Remember that Preferences are saved on a per-file basis, so get used to checking these

4) Pixel Preview
Pixel Preview is a handy way to see how vectors turn into pixels when you’re zoomed past 100%. Turn this on from the menu View/Pixel Preview (Command + Option + Y).

5) Check Artboards
Artboards are a great for managing pages for flows, but when creating they sometimes are not on whole pixels themselves. Enter Artboard Edit Mode (Shift + O) and check them.

6) Check Symbols & Swatches
Make sure all artwork is on whole pixels before creating Symbols and Swatches. If the original artwork is not on whole pixels during the creation process, than those symbols or swatches will not look pixel perfect when you use them.

7) Pixel pushing windows workflow
If you have to get nitty gritty, open a second window (menu Window/New Window) for the same file, turn Pixel Preview on (Command + Option + Y) and zoom way in. This way, you have the 100% view and a super zoomed in view side by side. It free’s you up from having to zoom in and out so often.