And now we come to the last installment in our series of summer-intern stories! In this case, we bid adieu to our new French Invo'ite and resident pastry chef, Clément.
Clément Prod’homme is an engineering student in Ensimag, the school of Informatics, Applied Mathematics, and Telecommunications at the Grenoble Institute of Technology near Lyon, France.
Talk about the projects you worked on.
During the first three weeks, I was in charge of the Soccer Data Visualization for which I mainly worked on the design and the rewriting of the algorithms. Then, I spent the last nine weeks on a new project called pophealth. I had to manage the data, build from the ground up the application, and develop a UI.
What were some of the most difficult problems you faced?
I think the first is freedom. When I arrived at Invo, Juhan told me he wanted the data viz [for the soccer feature story] to be prettier, which wasn’t really helpful because I didn’t know what to start with, or even what to do. Later, for pophealth, he just told me “this is your baby.” That was the opposite of what I’ve been told at school: that you always have the project’s specifications.
The soccer visualization involved a large and very detailed data set.
Then, it was also challenging that I had to choose the structure of the whole pophealth project, and designing an interface was kind of new for me.
Pophealth is intended to create a service that enables people to choose their hospital depending on various critera, and helps them understand some health key factors about Massachusetts. It uses data from the Massachusetts Center for Health Information and Analysis (CHIA).
Talk about the studio environment.
I saw pictures of the studio on Juhan’s Flickr before arriving in the US, but when I visited the studio for the first time, I was impressed. I’m used to cold work offices with few furnitures and no design but Invo is the contrary. It’s a huge space with wooden desks (real wood, not from Ikea) and filled with so much cool stuff everywhere that I’m sure I won’t find everything before leaving. Nevertheless, I already took a step forward and have a picture of most of the fake animals that are sprinkled inside the studio.
Clément and Juhan Sonin discuss visual design with large data sets.
Final thoughts? What will you take with you from this experience?
So much! First, because it was my first time in the US, I discovered the American culture and was (happily) surprised of how different it is from what I thought. Also, I really improved my writing and speaking English, even if sometimes I can’t pronounce the right way a word, or French comes out of my mouth unintentionally. Then, I gained a lot of front end skills and discovered what it’s like to design a UI. That was really interesting.
This internship changed me a lot, and especially, since then, I know that it’s the kind of job in want to do, and that I want to find a similar structure where I could blossom.
Clément prepared a fabulous lemon-meringue pie for everyone to enjoy, from a recipe his grandfather gave to him.
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