Informatics grad students travel to Egypt competition

Two IU School of Informatics graduate students are bound for Cairo to solve some “wicked problems” at Microsoft’s Imagine Cup, a global challenge focused on finding solutions to real-world issues. The event drew more than 300,000 student competitors this year.

“During their master’s program training, Fei-Xing Tuang and Yujia Zhao both practiced creating solutions to complex, ill-structured and messy problems – what we call ‘wicked problems,’” informatics professor Marty Siegel said in a statement. “The interesting aspect of the finals of Imagine Cup is that finalists are given a new design problem to solve in 30 hours, which means conceive, research, analyze, prototype and present their solution to an international panel of prestigious judges. I believe that Yujia and Fei-Xing are capable of doing this.”

While exhibiting some traits of popular consumer-based, online product purchase and exchange tools such as eBay, Craigslist and Freecycle, Tuang and Zhao said eXchangeFun is unique in that it contains design elements that will hopefully stimulate reuse at the community level by creating a recreational, treasure-hunting experience that stimulates interaction between users, according to an IU press release.

“One thing we heard from our user testing was that people would like to take a picture of all of their piled-up items in their garage, and then just let their neighbors and friends check the picture and figure out what they want,” said Tuang, who graduated in May with a master’s of science in human-computer interaction design, in a statement.
“Sometimes people can’t decide what they want to sell, but they want others to check and see if there might be something they want.”

Using tools that make it easy to upload and browse photos, and upload and tag multiple items, Tuang and Zhao developed eXchangeFun to post announcements like upcoming yard sales, to visit items designed for specific uses by taking virtual visits by going “room to room,” and to allow users to create inventories of their items, according to a press release.

“There are a number of factors, stakeholders and constraints within any wicked design problem, and all of them interrelate with each other,” Zhao said in a statement. “We need to be able to see the big picture, predict and analyze the impact the design can bring to the individual and society. Then it is also up to us to make the product easy and pleasant to use and to provide users a great experience, which requires very detailed and subtle thinking, empathy and constant design iteration.”

Tuang and Zhao were given a completely new design problem related to an issue of world concern Saturday in Cairo, and they’ll have 30 hours to come back with a proposal they hope will impress a panel of judges.

Siegel said that win or lose in Egypt, the two are still winners in his eyes.

“To be a finalist in a worldwide competition sponsored by Microsoft means that you have already won,” Siegel said in a statement. “What I appreciate about them is their social justice approach to design, particularly with respect to issues of sustainability. In past years designers did not concern themselves with the “afterlife” of products; a consumer would use them and dispose of them. For example, it’s estimated that 150 million cell phones are disposed annually. What if it were possible to sustain the life of an object beyond its first owner? That’s what these two creative students tackled as their design problem.”