New York City recently announced NYC BigApps 2013, the fourth annual installment of their open competition to create new and innovative technologies while promoting government transparency. Here at Undercurrent, we’re taking NYC BigApps as an opportunity to envision and rapidly prototype some potential solutions. This is our second installment (1st here) of envisioning and rapidly prototyping potential digital solutions for NYC’s fourth annual BigApps competition.

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The purpose of prototyping is to eliminate waste, whether that is time, money, or risk, in order to quickly prove the viability of an idea. The process is similar to the scientific method: a prototype is an experiment, and the idea you are exploring is the hypothesis you want to test. Unlike a scientific experiment, however, prototyping a product has the ultimate goal of creating a specific valuable outcome: a viable business.  Read more

New York City recently announced NYC BigApps 2013, the fourth annual installment of their open competition to create new and innovative technologies while promoting government transparency. Here at Undercurrent, we’re taking NYC BigApps as an opportunity to envision and rapidly prototype some potential solutions.

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The world is accelerating, and the distance between idea and execution is dramatically shrinking in terms of time, cost, and complexity. Someday soon we will be able to move near-instantaneously from idea to execution. While this may seem a little Star Trek-ish, already technologies like 3D printers and processes like rapid prototyping are chipping away at the divide between idea and execution, between the digital and physical.

We wanted to know just how far off are we from having our very own Star Trek Replicator (one Earl Grey tea, please), so we took one concept from idea to working prototype as quickly as we could. This is how we created the Fridge of Tomorrow.
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Leaderboards, like points and badges, are an unarguably popular convention of games, and the steady march of gamification means we’re seeing them turn up in an increasing number of places. Ranking top users based upon known and agreed upon metrics, leaderboards are an increasingly popular way for offering feedback since they incorporate a performance measure (“how am I doing?”) and make it social by allowing easy comparison with others (“how do I stack up against the competition?”).

But there is a subtlety to leaderboards which is often forgotten by the gamefiers of the world. When done well, a leaderboard can increase engagement – the sense of competition they bring can encourage users to get better at things they care about. The mass-adoption of leaderboards comes with many pitfalls, however, that not only disincentivize users but irritate the hell out of them as well.

Relevancy is the name of the game when it comes to feedback, the more relevant your leaderboard is to a specific user the more engaging it will be. Here are 3 things you can do to make better, more relevant leaderboards: Read more