PhizzPop

Inspired by the PhizzPop Design Challenge Boston

As some will remember, a little more than a year ago now, Outsight participated in (and won) the PhizzPop Design Challenge - Boston that was sponsored by Microsoft late in 2007. You can check out both our process and the resulting solution. The big take-away for the team (other than the three XBox 360's, that is) was the intense collaborative team experience that came out of working within the constraints of a three-day contest. In fact, Outsight team members who couldn't participate in the contest felt a little left out. The contest rules limited the teams to three people. So, Outsight has decided to reprise the experience to include our entire team.

Design Challenge Reprise

Next week, the Outsight team is going to stage our own Design Challenge. We will take three days to collaborate on a "Research & Development" project of our own choosing. We'll be trying out new techniques and exploring new processes and innovations without the constraints (and potential risks) of experimenting on client work.

Have a challenge for us?

Although we are busy coming up with challenge ideas of our own, it occurred to us to open it up to the larger community to submit potential challenges to our team. Do you have an interactive problem that you wish there were an elegant solution for? Then submit it to us, but please note:

• Do NOT submit ideas that are of a proprietary nature to you (or anyone else) as we plan to keep all rights to anything that we create as a result of this exercise and will likely publish it via our blog, portfolio or other means.
• We do NOT promise to choose from any of the ideas that are submitted to us, but will consider them.
• IF an idea is selected from those that are submitted, we don't guarantee that we will pursue it in the way that you intended. Our plan is to innovate, so we aren't looking to execute on a "solution" so much as we are looking to "solve a problem".
• We make no promises to have a working solution at the end of three days. We'll be aiming for a solid, cohesive concept (or several) or perhaps even a prototype.
• We make no promises that current technology necessarily supports the solution that we come up with. Although we are definitely based in reality, some times you have to dream a little bit to innovate.
• Although it is our intent to share the results, we don't promise that we will do so.

PhizzPop Design Challenge - Creating a winning application in 3 days

Turning out an application using new software with only three days to do it is quite a challenge, to say the least. But that is precisely what we were challenged to do in the Microsoft sponsored, PhizzPop Design Challenge, Boston.

PhizzPop posed a particularly interesting challenge regarding process. No one builds applications in three days. So the challenge isn't really how do you produce a quality application, but more how do you squeeze weeks/months worth of work into three days to produce a quality application?

To answer this question, I thought it might be interesting to bring folks into our PhizzPop War Room and explain how we did it.

PhizzPop Design Challenge War Room

Brainstorming:

Moments after the challenge was presented, we opted not to go out for Microsoft-sponsored drinks and chose instead to take over a quiet room in the Microsoft offices to brainstorm. We immediately began to review the personas for user tasks and discuss what we believed would be possible with current technologies. Then, prompted by Jon, Outsight's Creative Director, we talked about "If the application was magic... what would we want it to do?"

Outsight recently participated in a unique interactive design and development challenge - The PhizzPop Design Challenge. Microsoft, looking to stir up interest Silverlight and Expression Blend, approached 6 firms in each of 6 metropolitan areas in the US - New York, Austin, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Boston. Each firm could send a 2-3 person team for two days of training, a challenge would be issued, and each team would have the remainder of the week to create a solution using Expression Blend.

Outsight was invited, so we went.

Our team was comprised of Jon Reil, Brandon Goldsworthy and me, Denise Preston -- a designer, a developer and an information architect/project manager. We were up against some great folks from Digitas, Molecular, Cramer, RDVO, and PixelMedia.

The challenge? Create the interface for a home automation system. Details can be found here (DOCX).

Outsight architected, branded, designed and developed a system called Varlet (a knight's page, archaic form of Valet) that could be accessed via touch screens mounted within the home, via television screen and via a smart phone interface.

The competition culminated in an event held at the Saint Lounge where each group had to present their solutions to an independent panel of judges. The Boston panel of judges included representatives from Monster.com, Burnt Sand and 3 Comm.