Abstract: Help With Project Idea (AI+Psychology+...)

I've worked on projects that are designed to be consumer based.

• First thing I would do is find out who your market is.
  • How much money and time will they be willing to sacrifice for it?
  • What is your demographic?
• Next I would put a lot of thought into how you think that people will use it.
  • This is more important than most people think. People are far more likely to use something if they find it intuitive and simple.
  • Simplicity is one of the hardest things to achieve in a design. Anyone can create something with an infinite amount of money and time.
• Next I would figure out the philosophy of the design. This is key to actually getting you idea from paper to execution
  • Make sure that you understand what your project is going to do. If it's a hammer, make sure that you are building a hammer, and make sure that its main function of punching nails into a piece of wood, is at the top of its functionality. Everything else that it does is just a (wank feature), industry term.
  • It's all too easy to overcomplicate the intentions of the project. Stay focused.
  • You also need to be flexible in your design philosophy. Your original ideas will organically drive the design into new areas of thought, as the nature of your endeavor will become more evident as you get deeper into it.
  • You may find that your solutions may have nothing to do with technology at all. So don't go all Captain Ahab at the beginning with your approach.

I could probably mention more and maybe will if you find this helpful. And if you answer these questions with due diligence, the project will start to create itself.

 

Here is part of a script from the show Leverage that when I first saw this scene was so profound for design philosophy. You cannot get this kind of wisdom from a textbook. I know it;s a tv show, but the wisdom is timeless. It takes the weight of the "blank sheet of paper" off of your shoulders. This episode is called The Gold Job; season 4 ep 16. This scene is after Hardison's first attempt at creating his own conn for the team, which is overly complicated but nevertheless brilliant in design. His version of the conn fails, but is saved by the wisdom of the team leader Nate, who had mailed Hardison his prediction for how his plan would actually succeed in the end.


Eliot (tosses an envelope down): You got mail. (to Nate) I’m out, man.

(Hardison opens the envelope to find written on hotel stationary “A) Choke off the distribution. B) Buy a drill. C) Break into vault.”)

Hardison: How? How could you have possibly known this?

Nate: I knew enough. I knew you had a complicated con in the works. And I knew, as long as we had those three things on the list and that Barbara Madsen was distracted from all that gold piling up in that useless vault, that we had a shot at taking over the family business. You never count on the perfect plan. You know, the perfect plan, it has too many moving parts, and it’s... you got to expect the perfect plan to fail. I mean, that’s what I do.

Hardison: Then what do you count on?

Nate: I count on the simplest and ugliest plan, not plan “A,” no, but, like, plan “G,” for example. I start with plan “G.” Now, the quick, simple, ugly plan that I know is gonna work if everything goes bad. I just pretty it up a little bit, add this and that. I gave you a backup plan. That’s all. You know, Hardison, you should be proud.

 

That is the best advice yet. You are so correct. I've tried to think of many things on my own, only to find them on ebay for less money than I could build it myself.

 

What do you want this project to do? It seems that you want a learning platform, maybe? Or are you thinking of something else?
Or
What is your intentions for this project? You say that you want to use (psychology, AI, and education) to help people, so what is it about the combination of these things that you think will help people?

Why I'm asking this is because a project must be important to you first before you can convince that it should be important to others. If this part is not clear to you, I would recommend free-writing. Just write anything about why you think it is important. This is often helpful to organize my own thoughts.

 

@ayakuro Have you figured out what the ai would change to adjust for learning curve? Would it be something like adding more of X type of problem to the coursework?

Also I'm fairly certain there's research out there about what types of educational approaches work best, so maybe look into that and whether it's used in things like Khan Academy.