On my original team, I had a lot of thoughts surrounding the ethics of our app’s nature and its overall viability. My primary thoughts focused around its safety for marginalized people since apps like Uber and Lyft have assault and misconduct cases stemming from driver-passenger interactions in the thousands-per-year. Just because those rideshare experiences are fractional compared to all the non-problematic ones, that does not delegitimize the trauma and bad experiences those thousands of people faced in a setting they believed was safe. Not only are rideshare apps (in my opinion) fundamentally a risk, but they are not profitable.
They are a money pit of misconduct not only for consumers but in business practices like union busting and underpaying on the companies end. I could not support that idea, especially with my past experiences using rideshares, so I happily joined the ArtCo team.
On the ArtCo team I worked as a Designer developing the Style Tile, Look and Feel, and User Story/Experience in our app. Our goal was to connect students with student-artists. Through this process I learned how small student-run businesses reach their customers. While I have never tried to sell any of my art it is something I’ve wanted to do: so unlike my previous team, where I had a negative prior experience with the fundamental idea, I had an overall positive outlook on something that aimed to support the arts.
If we had more time, I would help work with the engineering group on the team to code up our prototype into something more complete. While I do like the idea of creating a mobile app for this service, I also think it would be nice to have a web page for it as well, much like Etsy. Expanding to webview could also broaden our reach. Another idea I had was connecting students with student-artists across campuses, for example, like Berkeley and Stanford and then creating a way for them to easily transport the art between nearby schools. I would also advance the recommendation system and artists’ profiles so users could follow their favorite artists’ storefronts and receive better recommendations based on interests, followings, and past purchases. On a less project specific note, I feel like this class forced me to use a lot of design thinking that I had only learned about/considered prior, as well as tools like Figma. Figma was something I had only heard of prior to this quarter so it took me a long time to both learn how to use it fundamentally and then use it functionally for this project.
I think my greatest expansion idea for this project would be primary market research at art schools. I wonder how much students there, whose curriculum revolves around art, would want to gain more exposure outside of their school and sell to students across the country? I think that would be something worth inquiring about in the future.
