Armel Patanian

This is a concept for new features for the Call of Duty companion app to increase social engagement.

Our project partner, Activision, challenged us to create social features for their Call of Duty Companion App. They were looking for features that would keep people engaged with the companion app and the game. The companion app as it existed, did not provide any social features and had a very niche use, limiting its audience. My group—Gaby Castro, Julia Engfer, Omzee Pitchford, Drew Hemnes, Casey Montz, and I—wanted to change the way COD players saw the companion app by adding new features, while keeping in mind the unique social climate surrounding Call of Duty.

Through our early interviews and netnography, we learned that certain players who enjoy playing Call of Duty still limit their social interactions with the COD community because of the risk of exposure to toxic behavior and the inability to find like-minded players. It was also apparent that the existing Squads feature was being underutilized. We felt that the way to increase social engagement was to encourage social behavior from these reticent players by reimagining Squads.

Our ultimate concept has two main features: companions tags and a modified Squad system. Players can create a more personalized profile that includes a way to add “tags” that identify certain characteristics about who they are as players. These then get used to find appropriate Squads (groups of players who pool their stats) containing groups of like-minded players. These squads then provide a chat feature that allows squad members to correspond with each other.

A mobile app and web portal as part of a service design to create a formalized and centralized way for students to make proposals to their schools.

Our project partner, Beyond 12, asked us to design a way to mobilize community college students to improve their schools. Our group—Di Xu, Aaron Guhin, Omzee Pitchford, and I—chose to find a way to improve the college experience for low-income students, who are generally more burdened than other students.

We conducted interviews with low-income students at Santa Monica College to understand their unique pain points and how those issues stand in the way of improving their schools. From these discussions, we learned that low-income students, on average, have additional obligations that detract from their ability to engage with their schools, particularly with regard to confusing and time consuming processes like making proposals for change.

The Beyond 12 Action Board is our concept for a system that makes the process of proposing changes to school administration more accessible to students as a whole while giving particular priority to proposals from low-income students. The concept contains a student-facing mobile app and web portal and an admin-facing web portal. Students would use their portals to compose and submit propositions for school change that would get posted to a student-facing board and would get sent to school administration. It contains features for searching existing proposals, following and joining proposals, tracking the progress of your submissions, discussing ideas with students and administration.

An app to help keep inventories for community fridges accurate and help fridge volunteers.

This project was created by me and Aaron Guhin for an Adobe Creative Jam. The prompt of the Jam was to create a prototype of a mobile app that would address an issue related to food security. We needed to both find an issue and design an app that wouldn’t seem obvious. We decided to design for community fridges because they are interesting. But we didn’t know much about them.

We conducted research into community fridges to gain a deeper understanding. Our observational research led us to discover that, although there were attempts to provide fridge inventories on websites, they were incredibly inaccurate. In order to make these inventories valuable, there needed to be a way to keep track of what went into the fridges and what went out of the fridges, but it would have to be done in a way that wouldn’t undermine the spirit of the community fridge concept.

Fridgee is an app prototype that allows volunteers, donors, and donees to participate in the process of keeping fridge contents up to date. These users would use the app to unlock the fridge and then use a simple interface to indicate what they added or removed. It features a minimal sign-up process, a way to find fridges, language options, a way to report issues, and a way for volunteers to schedule their visits.