Noah Liebman

So you want to compete at CHI?

My former teammate Debra Lauterbach recently wrote a great blog post with suggestions for potential CHI Student Design Competition participants. I agree with everything Debra said, but I wanted to weigh in with my own thoughts, reflections, and ideas, as well.

Trust the process

I was fortunate enough to have taken SI 682, the course that can provide a framework for the CHI competition, in my first semester at SI, and concurrently with SI 501, the Contextual Inquiry class. While I don’t want to bias anyone who has yet to take 501, I was really glad to have been exposed to the Contextual Inquiry process first in 682 (682’s schedule runs faster than 501’s). I might not be allowed to say this out loud, what with PEP credits and all, but by choosing to do a CHI project, you are probably opting to work without a client. As a more independently and entrepreneurially minded person, I appreciated this, especially because it gave me an opportunity to experience Contextual Inquiry on a more student-directed project; in SI 501, it felt like forcing a project with little to no intrinsic merit into the CI process just for the sake of doing the process. When applied appropriately — and by taking appropriate liberties — the process can be very revealing, as was the case for our project. Our solution was drawn directly from, and involved a symbiotic relationship between, two of our personas. Our personas were developed directly from our affinity diagram. And our affinity diagram was synthesized directly from our interviews.

Design what matters

As Debra described in her post, the Student Design Competition is not an interface design competition, but that doesn’t mean you can focus entirely on research and concept/service design. The visual design of your poster and presentation matter — a lot. While the judges and their interests change every year, there will almost certainly be someone who cares about visual design. In 2009, the then-coordinator of the SDC, Jon Kolko, gathered all 10 semifinalists teams together in a huddle and tore us collectively to shreds for having, on whole, poorly designed posters. Which leads me to my next point:

Check out the judges

If you make it to the semifinals, once they’re announced, look up each of the judges and make a note of their interests. It doesn’t take much time, but when we found out that one of our judges was very process oriented, we knew to include process material on our poster, and we knew what to engage him on during the poster session.

Narrow the scope

Local is big; diversity is big. Before you even  begin your research, narrow the problem space you’ll be investigating. We narrowed “local” to “stuff that is already in your local community that people are buying and importing new anyway.” This broad space led to thoughts around borrowing, and finally led us to thrift shops, as Debra describes. Diversity can mean a lot of different things, so instead of trying to “jump to solutions”, come up with a short list of what diversity can mean, then focus your research from there. Solutions will emerge from your research.

Engage with the community; make it relevant

Southeast Michigan provides many fascinating case studies in diversity: U of M took its admissions policy to the Supreme Court; de facto segregation between Detroit and the suburbs is still prevalent; Detroit’s per capita annual income is under $15,000, while two adjacent counties are among the nations 100 wealthiest; Dearborn is the heart of the American Arab and Muslim communities, the latter of which in particular is experiencing huge growing pains and assimilation questions. Once you’ve decided what aspect of diversity you’ll be looking at, get out there and talk to people: activists, non-profits, and regular folks on the street. Being engaged and relevant will make your project so much more compelling.

Have a solution that pushes the boundaries of the acceptable

A mobile app that establishes trust between total strangers to the point that they will be willing to walk together in the dark? Getting people to look for items at thrift stores for you? Sounds crazy, no? But these are the solutions arrived at by the previous two winning teams. They are original, non-obvious, and decidedly push the boundaries of what seems sociologically feasable. This is what excites the judges — or at least is what excites me. But to pull it off, you have to demonstrate that it can work, which nicely segues to the penultimate point:

User testing ≠ sociological feasibility testing

And you should do both! You will end up doing some user testing, but it’s more for the class than for the competition. Sociological feasability testing is what you really need to back up your work. For us, that meant two things: spending a day in area thrift shops looking for items people were asking for in existing venues like craigslist and Freecycle, and tracking down representatives of our personas and determininng whether they would play the roles we wanted them to. Last year’s team went through a similar exercise, spending many hours in a cold, dark Diag getting reactions to their system.

If you can confidently tell a judge that your hair-brained scheme at least has a good change of working, and you can point to existing academic research and your own legwork to prove it, you’re probably in pretty good shape.

Get going!

Getting to the point where you’re in good shape is a lot of work, so start now. As a first-semester student, I was expecting things to ramp up slowly. Fortunately, I had a couple second-year students on my team to snap me out of it. I distinctly remember getting an email from Debra fairly early on suggesting that we have two or three interviews done — by Wednesday. It freaked me out a bit, but certainly got me moving. It’s an exciting pace at which to work, and 100% worth it.

Good luck!