SOCHI is the Student Organization for Computer Human Interaction at the University of Michigan. One of SOCHI's most visible events are their regular rapid ideation and brainstorming sessions, called Design Jams. Design Jams have been sponsored by companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, Mozilla, bln.kr, the University Library, and more.
Aza Raskin, former Design Lead at Mozilla, Tweeted that some of the ideas presented at the Mozilla-sponsored Ideation session would be present in future builds of Firefox, including an idea for tab grouping that I helped develop.
One of the ideas that came out of a rapid brainstorming session I liked was a solution for hiding a phone number on a business card. In this example, a person would have a public company phone number, and a private personal office phone number. I figured that the phone numbers would have the same prefix, but different final four numbers.
My idea was to use symbols, in the shape of a keypad, that would hide the numbers, but be extremely easy for those "in the know" to figure out the code. In the image above, the hidden numbers are '4279' as shown in the diagram below.
This is just one example of an idea I really liked from an ideation session that I decided to develop further.
Sketching is an important part of any designer's repertoire. Below are a few sketches from various classes and personal projects I've undertaken while in grad school.
A "thumb calendar"
The Dropbox service, as an example of good design
Sketches from my project with Ford