Archive · Origin Project
Where it all started
07University of Florida · 2017

Ambient Intelligence —
The First Question

A web application to help geographically dispersed life science researchers track team engagement and collaborate on long-term projects. The first project that revealed: the technical decision is always downstream of the human one.

Duration 4 months (Jan–Apr 2017) Type Web Application Role User Research, UX Design, Prototyping

The problem that introduced me to everything

Life science research projects have a high failure rate — not because of bad science, but because of bad collaboration. When researchers are spread across time zones, institutions, and sometimes continents, the shared sense of momentum that keeps a project moving is fragile. Priorities shift. Communication lags. People disengage without anyone noticing until it's too late.

The problem I was given: design something that helps. But what does "help" mean when the underlying issue is that geographically distributed teams can't see each other's engagement, can't feel the pulse of the project, can't know when someone is drifting until they're already gone?

"The technical solution was straightforward. The human problem was not — and that gap was the entire education."

Research that changed the question

I ran a focus group over Skype with 8 life science researchers from different countries. I interviewed graduate students studying Health Sciences at UF. What I was listening for: what does collaboration feel like when it's working? What does it feel like when it isn't?

The answers reframed the entire problem. Researchers didn't need more communication tools — they had too many already. What they lacked was peripheral awareness: the sense of knowing, without explicitly asking, that colleagues were active, engaged, and moving in the same direction.

01
Different time zones broke rhythm
Asynchronous work meant nobody shared a working "now." The project existed as a series of disjointed contributions with no felt sense of shared momentum.
02
Existing tools created security anxiety
Life science research is highly confidential. Researchers were reluctant to use general-purpose collaboration tools that might expose sensitive data.
03
No engagement visibility
There was no way to see whether teammates were active on a project without directly asking — which felt like checking up rather than collaborating.
04
Priority drift was invisible
When someone's focus shifted, it happened silently. By the time the gap was noticed, re-engagement was significantly harder.

What the solution was — and what it taught me

Ambient Intelligence was designed to show team activity as ambient information — not notifications, not status checks, but a peripheral view of who was working, when, and on what. The kind of background awareness you get naturally when you share a physical office but lose entirely when your team is distributed.

I designed the information architecture around the emotional problem, not the functional one. The goal wasn't to give researchers more data about their teammates. It was to restore the felt sense of shared momentum that distributed work destroys.

This was the first project where I experienced the gap between what users say they want and what they actually need. Every researcher I interviewed said they wanted better communication tools. What they needed was a different relationship to visibility. Those are not the same design problem.

The pivot this project triggered
Somewhere in the middle of building Ambient Intelligence, I made a decision I didn't fully understand at the time: I cared more about the human problem than the technical solution. I was a software engineer by training. But what I wanted to do — what felt urgent and interesting and necessary — was understand why people behaved the way they did in complex systems, and design systems that worked with that behavior rather than against it.

This project was the moment I became a researcher. Not formally — that came later. But in terms of what I was actually doing when I sat down to work, I had already made the transition.
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