Ben Tseitlin

Handling notifications has become our main job regardless of our title. If you work on a computer, you’re used to notifications from apps like Slack, Mail, Basecamp, Asana and many more. Our modern information overload began when email was introduced into the workplace. A direct line can be drawn from its introduction to managing notifications taking up most of our day, often even outside of work. That makes it difficult to focus - we aimed to fix that.

Modern work environments distract us from doing our best work through nonstop notifications and interruptions.

An average worker has an ever increasing number of apps and devices to check. Our researched showed that most knowledge workers at least had to check a project management app (Asana, Basecamp), an email app (Gmail, Apple Mail, Outlook), and chat apps (Slack, Microsoft Teams) throughout a typical day.

We created one place to check for anything important and take back control of our attention. A digital device that uses an accompanying cloud service, helps you keep just what’s important in front of you. And it allows you to create long periods of focused work which increases productivity and decreases stress (and long work hours).

Using popular dating and music apps as inspiration, we sought to create a compelling event discovery app that would also let users submit their own ideas. We aimed to truly make Grand Park a park for everyone by allowing anyone to submit the event they wished existed.

Grand Park noticed their relationship with visitors was fleeting. And so they looked to us to provide ways to deepen that relationship.

We saw a potential for younger audiences and tech savvy travelers to use an app that would help them find the events that fitted them at Grand Park. To achieve the goal of deepening park visitor engagement with the park, we felt this approach would help build a community that wanted to keep visiting the park and used the app to discover events.

We found a core need to find new and interesting events that was unmet in many of our interviewees. People described the challenges with finding new events and figuring out new venues that they haven’t visited before. Our concept lets users browse events happening at the park in a simple and fun way. Our aim was to make the park a central destination for friends and families to meet up.

Sugimoto is a Japanese company serving markets across the world. I studied how their teams work across cultures and create innovative processes to serve customers worldwide.

Sugimoto makes fine teas that are available in markets with varying understanding and willingness to pay for high quality tea. How can the company work across cultures and elevate a category that doesn’t yet have widespread appreciation?

Coffee and wine are examples of products that grew in cultural understanding and appreciation in the US, which didn’t have a strong history with either category.

To create a new category for a high quality product that people are already familiar with, experimentation is extremely important. It’s vital to build a culture where employee curiosity is nurtured and their ideas can be fairly evaluated.