emily conrad

As part of my work with Moey, Inc, I’ve been working with ex-NFL player Wade Davis to research football plays and passes. We are putting together two interactives for a museum in Texas as part of their upcoming high school football exhibit. I’ve hit the ground running in an effort to learn more about football basics. I’m excited about the narrative we’ve developed; it touches on both learning and doing for an audience of novices and experts.

One of my side projects of late is an iPhone app for kids that encourages and rewards experimenting with food and food combinations. We are reluctant to call it a cooking app, because it is more related to exploring, finding, and experimenting in ways kids may not be able to do in real life. The team includes myself as the Lead Interaction Designer, Jesse Lowe as the Lead Programmer, and Laurie Filiak as the Visual Designer. Just a few days ago we noticed we had not accounted for a huge part of the experience; the soundtrack. This is a new territory for me, including a Composer as part of the team. Audio for the most part is perceived as annoying on websites, and would be an experience nightmare if it was part of software design. Even for an exhibit design an audio soundtrack is rarely considered. But when it comes to handheld devices with the goal of creating a complete experience, music jumps way up in priority. Music becomes even more important when your audience is kids.

Children have the amazing knack for remembering songs, even when exposed to them in utero. Back when I was pregnant the first time around, musicologist (and my future colleague) Gideon D’Arcangelo interviewed me for his radio show Listening In: The Delivery Room . This interview explores the role of music in the delivery room, but we also spoke about playing music for babies in utero. I confessed that I exposed my daughter to more Ratatat and Blondie than she could probably stand (which serendipitously led to me spotting Deborah Harry more than once in those 9 months). Four years later, she still has an inclination for both musicians.

In short, my point is that audio plays a huge role in kids entertainment. Something that Disney, Music Together, and Yo Gabba Gabba are both well aware of, in their own very different ways. And this project has encouraged me to think about the role of music in the overall experience. I have been asking myself and talking with our composer Austin King about how the music will complement the visual and interaction design, and how sound in general help give the player directive. I found myself having to go back through the wireframes and think about the final app not in terms of user flow, but musical flow and composition.

We are still a month out from deployment, but will certainly post more about the project once everything is complete.

The groundbreaking effort to digitize all of JFK’s speeches, papers, images, video, has launched just in time to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the President’s inauguration. I was pleased to hear about this accomplishment yesterday, and even more pleased to be part of the design team (at ESI Design) that made it happen. Organizing the nation’s largest online digitized presidential archive has been one of the most exciting (and comprehensive) projects I’ve worked on recently. Here’s a passage from the press release:

“Until now, the national treasure of historical material housed in the Kennedy Presidential Library’s collection has been available only by a physical visit to the library itself. With the launch of the new digital archive at www.jfklibrary.org, students, teachers, researchers and members of the public now just need an internet connection to search, browse and retrieve original documents from the Kennedy Library’s collection, gaining a first-hand look into the life of President Kennedy and the issues that defined his administration. ”

From an Information Architecture standpoint, there were plenty of challenges to resolve in the design of the site. Most importantly though, we sought to make the Archive and all of the contents accessible to every type of visitor. Since the JFK Museum and Library attracts many students, scholars, and loyal enthusiasts, there was a strong need to offer the complete depth of archived material while organizing the artifacts into natural groupings.

What I find most important about this launch is the transparency that’s being offered. It feels like an unobstructed view into the Kennedy administration’s decision making process and the challenges they faced. It’s empowering to citizens to have access to this material because our current administration is faced with similar types of challenges. While putting the wireframes and documentation together, I gleaned an incredible amount of insight into that era, learning more than I had in any history class about the 60′s. Especially when I happened across the Cuban Missile Crisis documentation. There is something fascinating about the level of political detail one can find here. Nearly every single communication document, including memos with hand scrawled notes, is available for viewing. And it’s easy to become immersed by them. Particularly, there is a certain emotional charge found in the audio recordings. I love listening to them and imagining the circumstances of their urgency.

All in all, I think the site is very inspiring acts more as a window into the future than a retrospective of an Administration.

Visit the site at www.jfklibrary.org

There was an interesting thing I noticed while traveling home this holiday season. When we got off the plane at JFK Terminal 3, there was a café with long countertops filled with iPads. Upon closer look, I realized the iPad had the sole function of receiving the customers order. So I could sit down, tap on the screen to order my food, and wait a few minutes until the waiter arrived. On the downside, the iPad did nothing else. There was no way to close out of the menu screen and bump up my Cut the Rope score.

I did a quick number crunch to figure out the economic advantage if using an iPad as a dedicated kiosk. On the one hand there is the option of creating a traditional kiosk; hire a design firm to create the interaction and visual design of the menu software, spec out the hardware including cpu and touchscreen, a programmer to write the code, hire a fabricator to create the kiosk shell and wrap it. And then have the whole contraption installed. On the other hand there is the option of creating an iPad app, which could be done by one of many nimble design and technology companies cropping up these days (or a freelancer like me!), and a means to secure the device down. It seems clear that each menu station might be a few hundred or thousand dollars less than a traditional kiosk. And from a design POV, I would much prefer to create an experience on an iPad then have to work with a subpar CPU or touchscreen which often yields problems that involve screen resolution, processing delays, and a lot of debugging after installation.

But what’s really interesting here is not the technology itself, but the decision to have people order from directly their seats without having a server take their initial order. As far as service design is concerned, I can see this being a major advantage in crowded airports, and when customers want their food ASAP. They can belly up to the counter, tap in the order (instead of waiting for a server), and in a few minutes the order is out. It’s a good model for that environment. However, on the day we showed up, there were a lot of people crowded nearby, but very few people at the counters making it a bit of a wasted space. If people don’t want to order or eat, they were pushed off to the side to talk on their cellphones or pull out their laptops. It would have been great to use the iPad for all those other things we travelers like to do. I imagine that would make the space more useful and flexible.

I’ve been lucky enough to help with redesigning the new Ice Cream Social website. Ice Cream Social, run by my friends Mary and Jenn, is one of the freshest design shops I’ve seen in a long time. They create all sorts of gorgeously clean letterpress designs, including invitations, logos, and accessories. It’s great to collaborate with creatives who have a strong design sense and unique aesthetic. In turn, I’ve been doing tons of research on custom made stationary and invitations. It’s interesting to me that an art form as old as letterpress still reigns as the true queen. And while embellishments have been popular for a while now, they look so rich impressed on cardstock. This definitely leaves those of us digitally inclined with something to consider.

Stay tuned for the new design of icecreamsocial.com in the coming months, but for now here’s some sampling of their work:

It’s finally here! A few months back I had an idea that might get my three year old to stay in bed in the morning, and to go to bed consistently at night. This idea was prototyped out by myself and the talented Jeff Gray using an Arduino Teensy, RGB LED, an Ikea Fado light, and a prototype desktop application to customize settings. I tried out the light on my own “Early Bird”, and it worked with great success. My family watches the light transition from pink to blue at 8pm every night. So we decided to make the light real and have it prototyped by a factory that specializes in LED lighting. We’ve decided to produce a very limited run of the Early Bird Light, and will be announcing the product very soon. It’s made of solid aluminum and an etched glass globe. The software allows you to customize night time, morning time, and nap time, and your little one can help select the color for each time period. A full RGB spectrum is available to choose from. And the software is super easy to use and very cute. Here’s a sneak peek!

Education Nation went up a few weeks ago, but I was too busy wrapping up other projects to post about it! Education projects are always fun to work not just because I support the cause, but because the goal is to open up the visitor’s natural curiosity to explore. That’s just what these books did; allowed visitor’s to Rockefeller Center to explore the seven different types of learning. As a designer, this was a great project because the start and end time was a matter of weeks, and I was able to then go onsite and observe how people interacted with the books. So much fun.

Here’s a video of Bloomberg talking about the larger mission of Education Nation, which is to reform the education system.

The Energy Lab is up and running! It was great to be part of this project.
Here’s a blurb directly from the National Guard site, where you can also find more information about this very cool initiative.
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Learning is best when it’s a hands-on experience. With this idea in mind, we’ve created The Energy Lab to bring the world of math and science to life for 11th- and 12th-grade students. The Energy Lab will house a 24-seat on-board theater and four cutting-edge experiences—representing the elements of Earth, Water, Wind and Fire—designed to expose students to math and science concepts, using the platform of energy and the environment, and fuel their curiosity through hi-tech, competitive interactions.

Along with using captivating experiences to teach students about math and science, The Energy Lab also reinforces the importance of staying in school and earning a diploma, while demonstrating new career opportunities in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) related fields. The Energy Lab will act as an innovative resource to schools and teachers nationwide through direct contact with students, an online web portal, and a national math and science contest.

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Happy New Year! As much as I enjoyed 2009, toward the end it began looking like we needed a little bit more love around us. Since it wasn’t known for sure if this need for love was something only I felt or a cultural phenomenon, it only seemed right to track the frequency in which the term “love” is used.  The Love Lights offer an ambient snapshot of how much love is passing through a few corners of the world at any given second. When love is expressed in one five different languages; swedish (kärlek), english (love), indonesian (mencintai), greek (αγάπη), and norwegian (elsker), a light will pulse on. The Love Lights are built off sentiments publicly divulged through Twitter, which has nearly 50 million users worldwide. I’ve been noticing that the lights for the non-english words stagger on as the day goes by, and are most active late at night. English, of course being the dominating language of Twitter, remains fairly consistent.

The Love Lights are made from LEDs, copper tubing, handblown glass bulbs, beeswax, and electronic components. Each bulb is etched with the word kärlek, love, mencintai, αγάπη, or elsker and then dipped in beeswax to give the light a natural quality. 15 x 9 x 21 inches. The only requirements to get the lights up and running are an ethernet (cable) connection and a power source.

The Love Lights are one of four light pieces I’ve created over the past year. Each one is made from similar materials with a different concept, such as the Belief Loop and War Lights. As an artist, it’s important to me that traditional electronic components are not the dictating aesthetic. Electrical parts like LEDs, wire, and pcb board are just a few of the tools needed to create these pieces. What is more important is how they reflect the human sentiments that go into making them work.

Contact me if you have any questions or are just curious about how it works. Many thanks to Jeff Gray for technical support.