Week 2 - Day 2

We started the day by going through the user journeys again, just to make them clear for ourselves. After this we had the opportunity to explain them to another group, who were very helpfull in pointing out some of the barriers we could encounter in our user proces. We had been so focussed on building a future scenario that we had forgotten to fill some important details in like user needs and the barriers in our story. But there was little time to do this, and after providing some feedback on the other groups' user journey we went back to redefine our stories to collect them into a single narrative and see where the most important touchpoints would lie. In this way we could deduce which part of our concept to prototype.

Some parts of the journeys were removed, some clarified, but finally everything was set in a working narrative line that we were all quite happy with. Some discussion ensued about the most important part of the user journey that we were going to prototype. Since all lines converged on, and went away from the store where our product would be bought, it seemed obvious that this should be the starting point for our prototype. But most of the group felt that the actual products were far more interesting to build and get insights into.

So we collected a lot of materials: wood, plastics, paper and lots of tape. And we started to build our two products in seperate teams. Alina and Jakob focussed on a suitcase that would clean your clothes while they were being kept in a special compartement of the bag. While Alexandra and Jan made a coat that while worn would filter pollutants from the air and store them inside of special compartments of the suit, these pollutants would then be drawn out and cleaned by the suitcase. We had a lot of fun building these things and time flew by until we decided to lay the finishing hand on the initial prototypes and try to find people to do some very important user testing.





Our first victims were two males in their 50's, waiting for something or other at a local carpark. They talked about their imagined use of the product and how they would feel about using it, but didn't actually try to interact with either the suitcase or the coat. However, through discussion we did gather some interesting userdata about our prototypes. With the help of Marco, one of the designcamp students working on a different subject, we were able to glean more information. Projecting himself into the future he told us how he could see himself using the product as he tried on the coat and rummaged through the suitcase. Interesting tidbits surfaced, some of the interactions were quite succesful, others could be worked on, and overal we got useful data to iterate with.





From there on it was a question how to proceed. We talked about our observations, quickly wrote down some ideas and some of us tried to create a discussion on what to iterate and how, but this met resistance and was kept aside to be handled the next day. Since we could contact a technical textile liaison from the designschool, the idea was put out to see if there were any opportunities that we could work with to build out some of the design area's. The idea of doing more research was pushed, and there was some resistance, but in the end it was decided the group would separate for the day to do some hours of research by themselves and present this the next day to be taken up in the iterations of the products.




To finish off the day we had some preliminary discussion about how we were going to visualize our products at the final presentation. Would it be a powerpoint? Film? Stop-motion animation? What would the format be? It was good to have at least some first thoughts on this to see where we would be on the final day.