Week4: Notes on Meetings

This week we were instructed to meet up 2 people. An industry professional who would know about the specific field we are interested in proposing our thesis in, and a person whith no knowledge of the field whatsover. We were instructed to sit down with them and tell them about our thesis. The professional I chose to contact is Tucker Viemeister. He is a very well known industrial and product designer (known for Smart Design) who I admire (I had him as an industrial design professor in ITP). Unfortunately he is out of the city until next week so I was not able to meet up with him but he promised to take a look at my thesis proposal which I sent to him and perhaps meet up with him next week some time. So as a result I ended up speaking with two other people. One of them is a recent graduate student who finished his degree in Culinary Management this winter. Mark has a vast interest in what he is doing and was adviced on his thesis by the owners of the restaurant Public in New York city, which was designed by AVROKO, a design group that I admire greatly. Lucky for me, he might be able to hook me up with them to talk about my thesis idea. Below is what Mark had to say to me:

Mark told me that interactive design really seems to be seeping into the restaurant industry. He is aware of several quicktime service restaurants where interactive design is implemented such as certain Subways and McDonalds. There is also apparently a new Popeye's concept called Lousiana Kitchen (w/ self ordering kiosks). Companies go out of their way to customize software for these types of kiosks to suit customer needs. He believes that this is revolutionary design that gives more control and privacy to people. With these types of kiosks customers can indicate exactly what they want through touch screens (i.e. I want tomatoes on the side and no broccoli), while being able to avoid being upselled by waiters. On one hand they benefit a restaurant because people could feesibly pay for their food with credit card (which by research indicates they will spend more money then by paying cash), while the customers themselves can gain a sense of privacy from waiters judging them on what they eat (ex. sometimes people feel intimidated ordering specific foods, or in Marks case he recounted stories from the South where people would mock him as being vegetarian when he did not want to order specific foods). Mark liked my idea of the cell-phone booths (to encourage people to step out of the table to pick up a phone call) and recalled several places where he knows there are booths to make a phone call from (with a landline). We discussed Mark's bacground as far as etiquette goes. He comes from a family where his mother was very strict on etiquette. Mark thinks that it might become concern when technology is introduced to a setting, but more then that he thinks that the people that would want to dine in this kind of a setting might be specific types of people. Mark personally does not want to be intruded in a restaurant setting. To him, privacy seemed to be a big thing when dining at a restaurant. He believes that a setting should be quiet and intimate, and prefers sitting at the sides of a restaurant then the middle. But at the same time, he believes that technology like the touchscreen, if ubiquitously introduced into a setting, can help people maintain even better levels of intimacy. He also thinks that it would introduce levels of turstworthiness about a restaurant. For example, if people can order food off a touchscreen maybe they can see the ratings of other people, and drive people to come online and check out the restaurant later on. Likewise, there would be less mistakes, and less selling on the part of the waiters, which he finds truly annoying in these settings. He suggested I also contact someone who is a behavioral scientist for some discussions.

The second person I spoke with today is my friends boyfriend TJ. Because my friend has been dating this guy for a while, I hardly know him, along with the fact that he lives outside of the city. TJ comes from a business background and doesn't deal with design. I first showed him examples of what interactive design is and then told him about my idea. It was good to explain my project in as clear terms as possible to someone who has no knowledge of the field. TJ believed that my concept could well suit people of a specific type (interestingly similarily like what Mark had to say). Although he himself has never been big on etiquette, TJ was intrigued by the idea of introducing interactivity into a setting for more play. While he agrees that interactivity needs to introduced into a setting in a ubiquitous manner in order to address etiquette concers, TJ seemed more interested in the aspects of play that it could introduce. I told him about U-Wink as well as Planet 212 and liked the quirks of both places and the social interaction that they introduced to a setting.