Tag: Visual Design

The Futurecast Series is a thought leadership series by AT&T Foundry and Ericsson. With a deconstructed panel format, Futurecast brings together leaders in technology, government, business and beyond (like Sebastian Thrun, Gavin Newsom, and Steve Case) to engage in vibrant discussions with an intimate, curated audience.

Since its inception in 2013, the series has been growing year over year. However, the branding and processes had not grown in turn. I noticed a unique opportunity to create a unified face for our growing event.

When I joined the AT&T Foundry in 2015, I led the charter to refresh our branded collateral, operational processes, and growth strategies for the Futurecast Series.

“Futurecast is a gathering of thought leaders designed to vet, debate and ultimately spark ideas that will set the course for our collective technology future. We invite the best and brightest around a particular topic to participate in a curated, intimate discussion with fellow experts in the field. It is a fantastic opportunity to move conversations forward, challenge orthodoxy, and generally define the future.”

– Futurecast Series Website

Our brand was all over the place. There were inconsistencies throughout the material.

And if the off-brand visuals were not enough, it was also not easy to engage with our end users and our processes were not streamlined to easily create collateral for future events.

We had a successful event with engaged followers, but we were not set up to scale well as we continued along our upward trajectory.

I started us off with an overhaul of the branded collateral, operational processes, and growth strategies.

For the collateral, I brought in an external visual design consultancy. I laid out our requirements, expected deliverables, and goals (low-resolution mockups) and kicked them off.

Soon after, we had new social media images, video screens, digital posters, and email templates.

In the meantime, I dove into updating the website. I updated the information architecture to encourage users to engage with past content and clearly see upcoming events.

With the website as a key touchpoint for our users, I wanted to improve our internal processes for keeping information as updated as possible. I developed easy to use standards in the form of templates to streamline the process of creating archives for past events.

Before each event, we host startup technology demonstrations. I created a website funnel for demo requests to offer an open door for interested companies to approach us.

To harness our user engagement and amplify it, we began live streaming our events via Periscope and Facebook to open up the events to a wider audience, while maintaining the intimate, curated atmosphere that makes Futurecast so special.

We added in analytics and tracking to better understand our user behavior.

I also shifted our hashtag use from a unique hashtag for each event to a single #futurecastseries for all our events.

We launched the new branding at CES in January 2016 and have been using it successfully every since. Even as the event has been handed over from teammate to teammate, my improved collateral, processes, and strategies have persisted, freeing up valuable time for teammates to start other projects, like the Futurist Reports.

I joined the Ericsson team at the AT&T Foundry in Fall 2015, and my experience has been extremely diverse and fulfilling. My work spans a number of disciplines and industries as we work to create innovative solutions to challenging problems.

The AT&T Foundries are a network of six innovation centers across the world–Palo Alto, Atlanta, Houston, Plano (2), and Israel, each sponsored by a different company or internal organization. In Palo Alto, we are sponsored by Ericsson and jointly innovate with team members from both AT&T and Ericsson. As a member of the Ericsson team at the AT&T Foundry, I serve as a bridge between the two companies.

The Foundries were originally created several years ago as an open, collaborative environment to inspire and promote the rapid invention and innovation of strategic ideas from concept to commercialization. Foundry team members drive their own projects and champion them to stakeholders, much like entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs. Projects emerge from personal passions, business unit needs, external partnership opportunities, and our employee crowdsourcing platform.

As one of the top internal brands to AT&T, we are highly regarded internally as the reliable source of all types of innovation, with a special focus on efficiency and disruptive innovations.

I was hired to lead design at the Foundry, and since then I’ve led numerous design projects, trained up team members, and worked on initiatives to bring design thinking to all of AT&T. I am frequently consulted on how to apply design to products, teams, processes, and business models. My work ranges from exploratory research to ideation to prototyping and implementation.

Projects

For instance, since 2016, I have collaborated with my teammate on the design portion of building a highly trafficked, enterprise product to provide a complete, seamless, self-service experience to incubate and validate any virtual network function against AT&T’s Domain 2.0 Architecture as part of the release of ECOMP (Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy). Check out some press on this project and how we are in the process of open sourcing it in 2017:

Has AT&T ICE’ed VNF Onboarding?
AT&T ICEs Vendors of Virtual Network Functions

In 2015, I immersed myself with our key enterprise customers to understand their needs and expectations around our new Network on Demand product. My research uncovered key product strategies and features that our team was able to champion both companies.

In 2016, I led design for yet another engaging, enterprise design project, though for an internal tool this time. Our efficiency innovation reduced the time for network capacity engineers to plan out how to decommission legacy network machines from several weeks to hours.

Leadership

Over the years as the head of design at the Foundry, I have trained my teammates in design thinking through collaborative projects, coaching, mentorship, and workshops. In turn, my colleagues are now applying design thinking to their work and even leading training sessions of their own.

One such instance occurred in 2016 when my colleague and I conducted interactive design thinking workshops for middle school and high school women interested in technology. Read more about our contribution here: AT&T hosts Girls in Future Technologies (GIFT) Day

My design team has found success identifying and solving difficult problems they could never have imagined in short periods of time through my guidance. One team member dove into understanding the needs of Uverse and DirecTV installation and maintenance technicians for several weeks. His research uncovered so many high impact opportunities that when we presented our work to the Senior Vice President responsible for these teams, the SVP allocated millions of dollars in resources to addressing these findings immediately.

While at the Foundry, I have had the pleasure to engage with hundreds of startups working in emerging technologies. In early 2016, I became especially curious to learn more about augmented and virtual reality and identified it as a high potential path to new revenue streams.

With my market research, I educated, championed, and began the dialogue within AT&T to apply these emerging technologies to our business strategy. As concrete demonstrations of strategic AR/VR plays, I sought out and developed strong partnerships with leaders in the industry to create cutting-edge projects.

In one such project, my partners and I created an augmented reality, spatial tagging tool for camera teams and film production crews using the Hololens in collaboration with FOX Studios.

In another, my partners and I developed hands-free, interactive, virtual reality entertainment experiences for hospitalized children and tested immersive entertainment as a form of distraction therapy.

Along with our numerous technology and design projects, marketing, partnerships, and thought leadership are similarly top of mind. I have contributed on visual design, information architecture, content strategy, startup partners, and developing marketing and brand collateral for several key initiatives, some of which are elaborated below.

Specifically, six times a year, we host the Futurecast Series, where we invite an honored guest to participate in a deconstructed panel where the curated audience is invited to participate in the conversation between the guest and moderator. Before the discussion, we also invite relevant startups to demo their latest and greatest to attendees. All our past and future events can be found on our website.

In 2016, we also began the Futurist Reports. In this series, we dig into technologies and trends while highlighting key insights that are reshaping entire industries and our world-at-large. Each report includes an industry-wide view from a diverse array of leading experts and features select startups at the forefront of technology. We delve into broader business implications of these technologies and explore indicators such as collaborations, investments, market demands, and technology advancements. Check out our latest reports on the Future of Drones and the Future of Entertainment.

Summer of 2015, I joined Esper, a small startup working on improving time management and productivity, as a consulting Product and Design Strategist. In collaboration with the founders, I guided the company through several key strategic pivots, including shifting us from providing services to focusing on building great products. I also led the team’s Product Design by conducting user research interviews and creating interaction flows, wireframes, and mockups. The journey of working in a small, roughly six person startup environment, where my voice has a significant impact on our direction, has been extremely fun and fulfilling.

Over the course of my two years working with Esper, I have been fortunate to influence several iterations of company direction. When I joined, the team had built a productivity product for Executive Assistants. To better improve their product, they dogfooded it on themselves by creating essentially an Uber for Executive Assistants, where Executives would be matched with Esper Executive Assistants 24/7, and the EAs hired by Esper would then use the Esper product to perform quality and efficient work.

Soon after I joined, I realized that we had learned what we needed from our service. As a team, we decided to close the service and shift our focus back to building an amazing product for EAs and Executives. We also discovered some unique insights into how the best of the best EAs worked. For instance, these EAs not only handled tactical scheduling for their Executives, they also strategically managed their Executive’s time.

I took findings like these and proposed several strategic directions beyond our scheduling and calendaring assistant product. One of these, in particular, stuck with the team, and we dove into building our next product, Esper Charts. With Charts, anyone can strategically manage their time by quickly analyzing how they are currently using it. We essentially built a Mint for time. Our users were more than just individuals interested in upping their productivity, but also entire groups that wanted to manage their time as a team.

As we focused more energy on Charts, we decided we needed some more tactical products that our users could use daily. Hence, we opened up our suite of products beyond longer-term time management and created short-term hooks with Esper Ratings and Esper Agenda Check.

Esper Ratings on Slack

Esper Agenda Check on Slack

Check out a TechCrunch blog post on Esper.

From March 2010 to June 2010 as part of Stanford d.school‘s prestigious Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability class, I worked with a diverse team of four, including Engineers and MBAs, to help rural Indonesian farmers earn fast cash from the weeds in their farms and simultaneously minimize deforestation.

With The Easy Steam Machine, rural Indonesian farmers can increase their income. The Machine provides them an efficient way to produce steam for their home essential oil distillation units. By reducing the time to produce steam from hours to just a few minutes, The Machine enables farmers to process at least 25% more biomass per day! Time is saved by (1) increasing surface area, (2) heat insulation, and (3) including a continuous water flow through system. As a $230 plug-and-play replacement for the traditional batch drum, the Easy Steam Machine ensures durable, hassle-free steam distillation.

The Easy Steam Machine speeds up the weak link in an existing system by two orders of magnitude. Using our boiler technology, we were able to reduce distillation time from 3 hours to 3 minutes!

Traditional Batch Drum Distiller

The Easy Steam Machine

We worked with IBEKA, our NGO partner in Indonesia, to identify the core need of these farmers. For one week, two of my teammates visited, observed, and interviewed these farmers in their fields. We noticed that these farmers were battling with lemongrass as a weed in their farms, and as a result, expanding into fresh rainforests as they struggled to keep their farms going so they could support their families.

Interestingly, most farmers had systems in place to convert their lemongrass into crude lemongrass oil, which they could easily sell for fast cash. However, these distillation systems were left unused, because it took them three hours of valuable time to boil the water necessary to begin the distillation process.

Subsistence farmers in Indonesia need a way to process all of their lemongrass and patchouli into higher value essential oil. Currently, farmers leave up to twenty-five and seventy-five percent of their plant material unprocessed because their essential oil distillation device is too cumbersome and time-intensive. Given the short harvest period and the low throughput of their device, farmers must leave potential income in the field, unprocessed.

In order to increase the quantity of oil output, we focused on increasing both the throughput and the yield, i.e. doing a faster job and doing a better job. The Easy Steam Machine is a replacement, plug-and-play device that fits directly into the traditional system — which makes it less expensive than purchasing an entirely new device. It also lowers the barriers to adoption because farmers will feel familiar with the design and user interface.

Inefficiencies with Traditional Distillation

The Easy Steam Machine

There are four problems with the existing system that lower throughput and yield: stifled fire, biomass heat loss, poor water-to-fire interface, and high water maintenance. We address each of these with our system by designing a more efficient fire, biomass insulation, higher surface area, and water flow-through.

The Easy Steam Machine speeds up the weak link in an existing system by two orders of magnitude. Using our boiler technology, we were able to reduce distillation time from 3 hours to 3 minutes!

Check out a prototype in action:

We handed this project over to our partner IBEKA to execute and distribute this among their served communities.

Read our implementation plan here.

Read our final presentation here.

Read more about the d.school class Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability here.