3. design/hunchworks

a. concept

Global Pulse is a United Nations initiative focused on the responsible use of big data. Hunchworks was one of Global Pulse’s projects, focused on collecting hypotheses, or hunches, of people around the world regarding what is happening in their area. While interning at Adaptive Path’s Austin office in the Summer of 2011, Jeff Wain and I got the opportunity to work on this project.

A core component of Hunchworks is the idea that individual in different geographic areas will have expertise and unique insight into the functioning and problems present within those areas. By collecting insights from these individuals, the aim is to have a real-time generated measure of situations around the globe as they arise. Creating such an aggregate collection of sources, however, introduces many questions including how hunches could be verified, how different contributors could help support or refute a hunch, and how individual’s safety and privacy would be protected when posting a hunch that might endanger them. These aspects of the experience of such an application, from the user’s point of view, were the focus of Adaptive Path’s work.

b. our contribution

The project was broken up into weekly sprints and Open Design sessions with members of both of Adaptive Path’s offices as well as other local designers in San Francisco and Austin. We joined the project at the mid-way point, beginning with considerations of what the different contexts of use might look like and how this could effect the relationships between different hunch. Through storyboards, wireframes, and a variety of different models for hunch argumentation, we defined and helped to clarify how a reliable network of support for contributors could be created, how hunches could be further explored and used as calls to action, the complexities of hunch credibility and verification and how hunches evolve over time.