VirtualC
A project on academic collaboration between professors with a wonderful team (Carolyn Shi, Gaby Maurice, and Yemi Oyemade). We investigate how professional relationships are formed through networking at academic conferences.
Our Solution
Through virtual reality technologies and a supportive mobile app platform, VirtualC creates an immersive experience for academic professionals to find and meet other professors beyond international borders at participating conferences. VirtualC enables professors to meet others from different academic and cultural backgrounds to encourage interdisciplinary research.
Key Questions (Goals)
What makes a successful collaboration?
How do professors meet their collaborators?
Who do professors collaborate with?
Why are collaborations important?
Understanding Users
Contextual Interviews
We interviewed 5 professors in their offices to learn more about their thoughts on research collaboration.
Here are some quotes:
Benefits
“Collaborations are needed to do the work that you cannot do yourself”
“Collaborators challenge your thinking”
Obstacles
“Sometimes there is an extra effort to understand other disciplines”
“Relationship building takes time”
Affinity Diagram
Using these interviews, we organized the notes into an affinity diagram to identify opportunities of design.
Main Findings
Professor valued interdisciplinary research as it brought them new perspectives and insights
Successful collaboration is attributed to personality fit, resources, and interests
Collaborations can fail because of personality mismatch and uneven work contribution
Collaborations often begin informally – from casual conversation
Persona & Journey Map
Designing The Solution
Literature Review (In a nutshell)
Before we created a new solution, we familiarized ourselves with research on collaboration success. Here’s what we learned:
Research collaboration is important because it pushes for scientific discovery advancements
Working jointly saves costs such as time and resources
For professors, research is important for career advancements such as achieving tenure
Recently, many academic fields are becoming increasingly interdisciplinary
Successful collaboration is dependent on external (e.g. funding and resources) and internal (e.g. personality) factors
cultural Probes
Cultural probes were used to further inform ourselves about who professors are “as people”, their thoughts about collaboration, and to retrieve creative forms of data to guide our design decisions. The probes will allow for unexpected insights that we would not have gotten from other research methods such as diary studies or participatory co-design. Even though cultural probes are known for its high risk, we are confident that it will provide us a high reward (especially combined with previous interviews and literature reviews).
There were 6 professors that each partially completed the packet. Due to COVID-19, the cultural probe packet was digitally designed to send to professors remotely. Professors were understandably busy and were asked to complete to probes to the best of their ability.
The cultural probe packet contained 8 probes for each professor to complete:
Each packet contained instructions on how to complete each activity. Here is a sample.
Instructions for Design you ideal collaborator:
Think about what you look for in a potential partner that comes from a different department/field of expertise than you.
Record yourself talking about this and add it to the Google Drive folder labeled “01: Design your ideal collaboration partner”.
Add a visual too! Draw up a quick sketch or find a photo and add it to the Google Drive folder labeled “01: Design your ideal collaboration partner”.
The data we retrieved were in forms of audio recordings, drawings, and written descriptions. Using this data, we found that professors often collaborate internationally and that successful collaborations happen when both parties are able to learn from each other.
Idea generation
Each team member brainstormed individually first. Then we came together to discuss possible solutions. In total, we brainstormed around 40 ideas.
Some highlights were:
Conference Group Chat
Tinder for Professors
Partner Matchmaker - Reality TV Show
Professor MMORPG
Collaboration Bridge Building
Design Concept
To choose the final design, we weighed necessary requirements:
Must promote interdisciplinary research collaboration
Must provide a resource for professors to find new, relevant research collaborators
Focus on meeting the “right” potential collaborators (i.e. using personality & research goals), and not on other stages in research collaboration (e.g. during the collaboration & determining credit)
We developed VirtualC, a virtual reality meeting space of opportunity for academic professionals to discover other professors studying a different disciplinary, but with similar research goals as themselves. A supporting mobile app helps to organize the professors scheduled VirtualC sessions. VirtualC will be hosted by conferences from all over the world.
THE MOBILE APP
INITIAL SKETCHES
THE VIRTUAL REALITY
INITIAL SKETCHES
Storyboard
LINK: The Virtual Reality
User FeedBack
We were unable to user test VirtualC because of time constraints and COVID-19, but we hope to do this at actual conferences.
Video
LINK: Video
Reflections
Summary
Let’s answer the key questions:
What makes a successful collaboration?
A successful collaboration is dependent on many factors from personality fit to amount of time and resources
How do professors meet their collaborators?
Professors meet their collaborators in many locations, ranging from their own institution, to academic gatherings
Conferences are a common space for professors to meet new academics they wouldn’t normally see on a daily basis
Who do professors collaborate with?
Professor collaborate with those who have the same or similar research goals
They are often interdisciplinary, and recently more international
Why are collaborations important?
In terms of research, collaboration advances research endeavors
Collaboration exposes new insights and perspectives of others that add to one’s own understanding towards the research goal
Relationships can form beyond the collaboration, which can lead to future collaborations
Final thoughts
There are many different kinds of research methods to choose from, but it is about choosing the right one for the project in question. Each method has their own benefits and challenges. For this project, we were considering between cultural probes, diary studies, and participatory co-design. While both diary studies and participatory co-design would help us learn more about professors, they take up a lot of time on the users’ end.
Seeing that there was also a pandemic underway, user recruitment proved to be difficult. Cultural probes gave professors to respond creatively, and also return the artifacts at their own pace. Although they might not complete all the activities, it is expected that we won’t know what we’ll get back! Unlike other forms of traditional data (e.g. survey responses), we have to digest audio recordings and images, which take longer to interpret. However, the kinds of data we get back are inspiring and helped us develop a creative solution!
I hope to continue using and learning about all kinds of research methods in my future endeavors!
Thanks for reading 🤗