Apple Store west 14th st
notes:
• Lots of glass – futuristic, exciting, new
• Simplistic
• Technology advancements
• Advertisements
• White/clean
• Employees – lots of them, same blue uniform
• Glass grad stairs
• Wooden tables to display the hardware/software – looks like podium, effective way because it looks so majestic
• Big ad on top – lures customers, eye-catching
• All products were linked to chargers = working/functioning full battery all the time – gives a sense of no end of time
• How much do Apple employees get paid?
• It seems like such a high demand job since its “Apple”, how hard is it to work for Apple?
• How much does this store in particular make in a day? *Roughly on average*
• Apple inspiring to me because: can sell few amounts of products for a lot of money so their profit margin is high
• How hard is it to work for Apple’s designing team?
• How/where does Apple get their inspiration?
• How many design teams are involved in software? and in hardware?
• Will Apple be supporting and maybe creating public surveillance systems for the city?
• How private is the cloud?
• What are the chances of being hacked now a days? *my theory is very high
• Will Apple be one of the firsts to make big advancements on AI?
• How close are self driving cars to becoming legal on the streets?
• Apple is one of the leading technology companies, and was first to create their own software and hardware – total control of their products – important when making innovations
System Mapping:
I chose to start my research by visiting the Apple store on west 14th street in New York City because I know I want to direct my research question towards technology. Apple has always been an inspiration to me as a business woman and as a designer/computer scientist. Not only is Apple on of the leading technology companies in the world, it has innovational products that changed the way humans live and interact. Apple was the first computer company that was in charge of creating it’s own software and hardware, which enabled them to be flexible to changes and able to adapt the way the whole thing looked and worked by their own standards. It was the first company that embraced the idea of user-friendly. Meaning, not only did they want the product to work, they wanted people to want to use it. They wanted it to feel, touch, look good to the user and excite them to learn how to use it. So I started with visiting the Apple store, one of many, to get a feel of how they advertise, employ, display, sell their products. I used the second research process we learned in class to map my system of the Apple store, by noting down everything I saw or thought of when I think of: Apple Store. Then I chained them all with arrows to see if I knew who talks to who, who is involved with who, and if I can think of all the elements that went in and are in the Apple Store and products.
My major is design and technology, which makes me a huge fan of this idea of combining the computer science “software” side to the design “hardware” side. I have many questions and possible research questions that can steer off from this topic because it is a broad subject. I am very intrigued with Artificial Intelligence, AI. Many companies and teams are investigating this idea of a computing software that could potentially think and process like a human. It is far from being successfully completed but there are elements of AI in many products that are on the way of being created, like self-driving cars. Self driving cars might not be the best idea, in terms of taking a person’s free will to drive on their own, but could be a huge advancement on taking over truck drivers because it would be an efficient way to ship products. Then again, that causes thousands of people’s jobs to be taken away, so there is a huge debate on advancing the AI concept to products that can take over many people’s jobs.
Another topic I can branch off to is public surveillance and privacy. Apple products are huge on privacy yet they also have a high amount of product theft. Now a days, there are countless hackers worldwide only getting better and better at cracking people’s accounts. While the Apple users are less and less aware of how to keep your data private, which means that if a person has not been hacked chances are they could soon. Apple’s entering code is very secure, as they keep prolonging the code digits to make it harder to guess the code, also wipes it clean if too many wrong attempt, find my iPhone app for stolen phones etc. Public surveillance systems are being implemented in cities which also interferes with people’s privacy. How can we keep our lives private when the computer asks if we want it to save our password for our bank account? How can we not get our identities stolen when all our photos and credit card information is on the cloud?
When creating the system mapping of the Apple store, couple questions arose. How many different designer teams are needed for such innovations? Who is in charge of privacy advancements? How can we be sure our privacy is in tact? Will Apple be a part of creating public surveillance systems? Does Apple have a team working on AI software? Will AI software take over everyone’s jobs even the artists? To concise my research question I will have to pick a branch and pick more specific idea, because these are all very large questions. My next steps could be to make a system mapping for the individual questions them selves and see if one has enough information to base my research on. That is one issue with this topic, a lot of my ideas are futuristic which means that some ideas like AI might not have enough data to support or deny my theory.