Eye Tracking Interactive - Iteration 2

The eye tracking interactive teaches kids and adults that their brain is hardwired to look for faces, motion, and changes in color. It accomplishes this experience by showing them a short video followed by the same video with an overlay of where they were looking.

The first version of the eye tracking interactive went through user testing and a few changes had to be made to help the user calibrate with the eye tracker. A problem I was facing with the eye tracker is to make it accessible for children and adults - dealing with their various heights. The first version was using face tracking to estimate where the persons face was in three-dimensional space, but this proved to be tricky since people continued to move after they calibrated. The removal of the face tracking system and an addition of a pair of eye-glass frames proved to be an easier way to keep people's head still while they were watching the video. Furthermore, the eye-glass frames conveyed the information that the user's eyes are being used to interact with the interactive. The following images and video show the changes made to the interactive.

Lie to Me

Lie to Me is an experience that teaches kids and adults about micro-expressions. When lying, the brain reveals its inner state through micro-expressions that cannot be controlled. I prototyped Lie to Me while working for the Franklin Institute. This digital interactive involves two players, one interrogator and one liar, facing each other across a table. They interact face-to-face and with two touch screens. A webcam is recording the liar every time the interrogator asks a question. The interrogator's objective is to analyze three video recordings of the liar and look for micro-expressions, and finally, choose the answer that contains the lie. This experience was developed using processing.

GoodCompany Group at Philly Tech Meetup

psGive, PhilanTrack, and Desmo presented their business and demoed their service two nights ago at Philly Tech Meetup. The evening was dedicated to social impact startups and all three were from GoodCompany Group, Philadelphia's social impact startup accelerator and incubator. The room was filled with entrepreneurs, developers, designers, investors, and two folks from the mayor's office. The feedback they provide is invaluable - Philly Tech Meetup is a space that allows the startup community to see what everyone else in the community is doing.

Stefan checking his notes.

Sean practicing his presentation.

Stefan (left), Sean (back), and
Dahna (right) preparing
for their presentations.

The first presentation of the evening was by Sean Steinmarc, founder of psGive. As he explained it, "psGive drives fan engagement through contests fueled by charity partnerships." Their platform brings together three audiences: brands that want to improve their image, social network users, and nonprofits. psGive is solving two major pain points: regulations and engagement. If a brand or nonprofit wants to run a cause driven campaign, there's a mountain of regulations they need climb over. And both nonprofits and brands want to be able to engage with their audience, psGive amplifies that opportunity.

Sean presenting PSGive.

Dahna Goldstein, founder of PhilanTrack, has created a service that sits between foundations and nonprofits, providing streamlined access to filling and submitting grant applications.

Dahna presenting PhilanTrack.

Stefan Portay, director of business development at Desmo, was the last presentation of the evening. Desmo is a platform that allows online shoppers to receive discounts and donate to the charity of their choice.

Stefan presenting Desmo.

The evening winded down with happy hour at City Tap House.

To see more pictures of this event, check out this flickr set.

Analysis of Second Round of Interviews

After completing the tangible interviews, I came back to my studio and put up the research all over the walls. I looked at the differences, similarities, and even refined the ecosystem map.

These interviews were set up to find out where people in the ecosystem believe they may find mentors in order to discover challenges that the entrepreneur may face while finding and accessing a mentor.

Main Takeaway:
I learned there’s a misperception about where entrepreneurs may find mentors. Entrepreneurs on the outside of accelerator and incubator programs believed that the majority of mentors could be found and accessed in incubators and accelerators. However, those on the inside of incubators and accelerators revealed that they find their mentors from previous founders of startups that have either had successful or failed exits. Essentially, they find experienced entrepreneurs who have enough available time on their hands and are at a place in their life where they want to give back to the rest of the startup community.

Second Takeaway:

While asking entrepreneurs to point out where they find mentors and how many mentors are closely or loosely tied with their startup, I learned that it's the norm for entrepreneurs to have many mentors. Each mentor plays a specific role, providing feedback and strategic advice on a specific part of the business. Their mentors would provide strategic advice on areas such as customer acquisition, refining the business model, hiring team members, product development, financial related tasks, etc. For example, a particular entrepreneur I interviewed explained that he had formed a relationship with one of his customers, and this customer has mentored them by providing strategic advice and feedback on how the product should be developed.

An important distinction:
These two takeaways revealed an important distinction: the generalist mentor and specialist mentor. The experienced entrepreneur brought in by accelerator and incubator programs seem to fit the profile of a generalist mentor because they have experience dealing with more than a single area (product, team, financials, customer, business model). The specialist mentor, as the word implies, has a single specialty and is providing strategic advice and feedback on that area. As stated before in the second takeaway, the norm for entrepreneurs is to be in contact with several specialist mentors.

Finally, I learned about four barriers to accessing mentors. Read Barriers to Accessing Mentors.

I later learned about how entrepreneurs identify a mentor for their business, and specifically that it's to the benefit of the entrepreneur to focus on finding and pursuing specific mentors.

Back to Table of Contents.

Barriers to Accessing Mentors

Barriers to accessing mentors can mean several things and arises from several underlying problems. In the graphic below, you can see the four areas that prevent entrepreneurs from accessing mentors.

I’ve learned from interviews and observations that having busy schedules act as a hinderance to permitting entrepreneurs and mentors from meeting face-to-face. 

Next, being geographically separated literally creates a disconnect between the experienced and novice entrepreneurs. 

The need for serendipity to take place, even though that’s the natural way relationships are built and begin, can also be seen as a barrier to connect the experienced and novice entrepreneur. For example, at a networking event where a novice entrepreneur has the intention of finding an experienced entrepreneur to discuss her business, might get stuck in a conversation with a software developer and not have enough time to find that experienced entrepreneur on the other side of the room. 

A very important piece of information that took me a while to discover, which also contributes to a lack of access to mentors, is that people with the right experience, whether their entrepreneurs, lawyers, investors, etc, don’t always self-identify as mentors. Even though these individuals could provide the same value as a mentor, the title mentor tends to have a burdensome connotation connected to it.

Back to Table of Contents.

Second Round of Interviews: Tangible Interviews

Having created a map of the ecosystem, I then went on to capture the deeper perspectives of individuals within the ecosystem. Borrowing concepts from cognitive science and its role in structuring effective interactions, a strategy I developed for creating an engaging interview is the tangible interview.

The concept behind the tangible interview is to enable the interviewee to physically represent information. The interviewee not only talks about the information, but can also see it and feel it. The tangible interview permits a better “grasp” of the information being communicated.

I think the effectiveness of the tangible interviews lies in its ability to create an existing structure for the information. Thinking about a question and answer survey of a typical interview is one way to structure the output of information; however, verbal communication limits the bandwidth of information that may be transfered. Furthermore, verbal communication also limits the types of individuals that may effectively convey what they actually mean by certain words.

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Mapping Philadelphia's IT Startup Ecosystem

To understand the varied perspectives from my first round of interviews, I grouped the different interviewees into categories that define the role they play within the ecosystem. These different categories include: service providers, coworking spaces, startups, incubators and accelerators, investors, community organizations, and universities. Once I grouped them, I realized there's an exchange of "stuff" that allows each group to continue to operate within the ecosystem. This "stuff" included funds, equity, labor, experience, etc. At its simplest, it's the ebb and flow of human interactions. It gives rise to organism-like structures that can be identified from how the people within the startup ecosystem group together. Furthermore, grouping people and the organizations they're a part of into these quasi-defined structures allows for one to analyze the interactions between those groups.

Having finished grouping them together, I realized I could use the map as a tool to further discover where certain resources may be located within the ecosystem. The resource I'm concerned with finding are mentors and the experience they provide. The current version of the map can be found here. The first version of the map is below:


I now had an interviewing tool to engage the interviewee in a way that uses more than speaking and listening, it uses touching and playing, an interviewing strategy I've coined tangible interviews.

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Atomic Sprocket Applet

Since the previous post, I've added a bit more pizzazz to the atomic sprocket. And if you want to play with it, I've embedded the applet here. If your computer has a microphone input, play a song and watch the atomic sprocket visualize the audio. If you want to get the script to embed this anywhere else, you can find it and its source code here.