Playgrounds: Week 1

Hello, and welcome to the Playgrounds design and development blog.

Playgrounds is a fifteen week project at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center. Working with Google’s Experience Design team, the ETC has assembled a cross-disciplinary team of five designers. We’ve been given the task of developing a Google Assistant driven experience to be used in one or more of Google’s Experience Centers. The team consists of Alan Turner as Experience Designer, Atul Goel and Ray Tang as Programmers, Axel Arth as Producer, Tera Nguyen as Product Manager, and Yvette Han as our Visual Artist.

To make the most of our design process, we knew we couldn’t lose any time. Energy spent on things that won’t support our final deliverable is something we can’t afford, meaning that understanding our task clearly became first priority. We started down this path by laying a strong foundation of logistics and communication. The team collaborated to figure out individual roles based around our strengths, as well as the broad tasks we could foresee. We also kicked off the process with our faculty advisers, Shirley Saldamarco and Carl Rosendahl. With roles, responsibilities, expectations, and hours of operation established, we were ready to meet our client.

On Wednesday, we sat down for our first meeting with the Googlers that we would be working with for the remainder of the design process; Josh Jeffery, Diana Huang, and Cynthia Le.  Over the course of our meeting, the team was able to clarify what would be expected of us, get a better understanding of the tools we had at our disposal, and begin preliminary arrangements to visit an experience center in Week 3 of the process.

The meeting was vital for our understanding of the specific goals we were expected to meet, but it was also valuable on a personal level. Google has a very distinct culture, and getting to experience that through its employees was important for our understanding of the process. While the technical side of the project will be key, experiencing the fun, easy-going feel that the project will need to embody was vital to building something that Google will actually want to implement. Moving forward, it will not be enough for us to just harness the technology as fully as possible; we will need to make the experience as honest and human as we can.

To do this well, we needed to research the current landscape of Google’s Voice Assistant. Starting on Friday, the team began researching multiple aspects of the Assistant, ranging from personal feedback to design specs, and even market research. The broader the base of understanding we can achieve before we begin our design, the better we can bring something to the Google team that fits the design problems they need addressed. 

Next week will be focused on that same research, with exploratory design beginning to flow out of our findings. This will be followed by discussing initial ideas to our client. That will allow us to better understand what interests them, and figure out what areas we should pursue in earnest.