Day 5! Brain explosions, Idea's, Concepts, Post-it's!

Crammed full with action packed excitement in storms of brain!

After presenting our persona's and major design area's we were glad to receive some okay feedback. What I thought was quite odd was the fact that the feedback focussed around the presentation itself instead of the actual idea's. Which brings me to a point of critique: there was very little time to prepare this presentation and the point of it was to provide a halfway feedback mark, not to gain higher insight or understanding in the art of presentation itself. Good feedback was cut short (although this is understandable since we were not in a process of collaborative ideation) and there were "I like your persona's" galore. Also the critique that it would be better to let each member of the group take part in the presentation is something contrary to what I have learned, what makes more sense to me is that you let the best speaker, the one with the best skills for the job, do the work that is cut out for them. Anyway...

After the presentations we started a rapid ideation phase that was a lot of fun. Post it notes were flying all over the place and people were shouting idea's left and right. There was some need to redefine what we were doing every now and again, but we surpressed this as much as possible and just focussed on doing instead of talking about it. With the use of our three extreme personna's:

The Eco Warrior (anti-tech neo hippy with the powers of the earthmother)



The Tech Dude ("I care but I won't lift a finger, unless it's cool stuff")



The Sustainability Mom (cycles all over the place and packs her shit along with her)

we were able to gather a lot of ideas in our main design area's:

The Pollution Cape
Social Gathering to Make
Invisible Digital (protection)
Dry Cleaning Suitcase
Magic Cape System

An hour (or an hour and a half, or maybe two? All time seemed to dissolve) got us to about 120 ideas, big and small, that we were feeling quite happy about.

From this happy bunch we each picked the ten ideas we thought were the most interesting and fun to work on, even if that meant leaving the initial design problem. Some of the ideas got 3 stickers and most of the ones we picked centered around the cape and suitcase design spaces. Of the 120 ideas only 8 remained, and in some way or form these could be spliced onto and into each other, it seemed there was a pretty big unspoken consensus in the path we should take.

What there wasn't consensus in was the way in which the idea's should be handled from that point on. If we should conceptualize them further before putting them to paper, or if we should combine certain elements here and there.

In the meanwhile the Body Beamer Bar (a title chosen randomly for it's futuristic feel, nothing to do with the ACTUAL body beamer bar...) had already started. But we were heating up the discussion again, and then cooling it down by sitting in the cafeteria and penning our concepts onto the idea forms provided. We kept it simple. Some idea's could be made expansive or combined, but hours after the deadline and after a week of intense creation, discussion, argumentation and understanding we were in need of an end point (and perhaps a party!).

Day 4 – Much ado!

Today was another intense day of discussion, confussion and creation. We started out by discussing the interviews we’d taken the day before and generated the most important insights about the users we interviewed.

A presentation about persona’s provided us with a lot of interesting ways to communicate to each other, and think about, our prospective users within the team and to the outside world. But soon after drama ensued within the team as a dramatic discussion erupted about the user data we had gathered so far and the need to find more extreme users to distill stronger insights and meaning from. This resulted into Alexandra and Alina to go out and find more extreme users while Jakob and Jan stayed behind to work with the data already available.

So the boys projected the collected user insights into the future and didn’t shy away from crazy ideas. We worked in tight timeframes to quickly generate a strong futurevision and we identified interesting design spaces for two persona’s. In this we went a bit too fast and skipped an important step. We didn’t give enough characteristics to the persona’s to treat them and think about them as real persons, this is something we will have to address soon.

The girls came back with some excellent user data that fit nicely into the extreme users category. And so the ecowarrior persona was born. Insights were gathered and a framework for the persona was designed by Alexandra and Alina, while Jakob and Jan identified some of the user need for our extreme tech persona, based on none other than mister Mallard.

We felt the importance to discuss some planning issues and the need for better structure regarding breaks and dinertimes. This is something we need to constantly keep an eye on to keep the process healthy and uplifting.

Nearing the end of the evening a dramatic miscommunication ensued about the design spaces for our extreme ecowarrior user. But after discussing this over and over again, rehashing and repeating our views on the subject (How do we create design spaces for a user that keeps away from technology and lives in a transient commune?) we were finally able to understand that we were talking about the same thing. Resolving this thankfully led to a quick analysis of this users’ needs.

We didn’t create a formal or even funny presentation for the next day to present to our peers. Rather we thought to present our ideas from our workspace to gather valuable feedback instead of entertaining our collegues. However we decided to come in a little early tomorrow to work out some of the design spaces and think about the presentation for a bit.

Background

Air pollution in major cities like Amsterdam, London, Mexico City, Detroit and Beijing is not something abstract. It is something people face on a very concrete way on a daily basis. It's not uncommon to see cyclists or maintenance workers wearing filter masks. And if you have a little ride on the metro you can actually see the pollution sitting on your skin, feel it in your throat, in your eyes and under your nails.

Air pollution comes in many different flavours. It is a well documented fact that air polution not only damages the environment but has strong health implications for humans and other animals alike. For example carbon monoxide, which comes from burning fossile fuels, lowers the amount of oxygen that enters our blood and makes us confused and sleepy. But scarier is lead that can cause nervous system damage and digestive problems leading even to cancer, especially in kids.

With the growth of the world population and the increase of emerging industrial economies such as in China and India, the use of motor vehicles is on the rise. Therefore it seems unlikely that a decrease in air pollution will occur naturely in the near future.

Day 3

After a having day of inspiring lectures on tuesday the team came together on wednesday to discuss the themes for the project in more detail and decide on a specific design challenge. Through this process, it became much easier pick out the most important stakeholders to question. Cutting this down to only a couple of interesting prospective users, enabled us to quickly go out and get some answers on short notice to inform our design proces.

However, it was quite difficult to find the right questions to ask. We started to define our goals: "What do we want to know?", but even then it wasn't easy to formulate questions that did not lead the interviewees too much.

After having done some interviews and gathered some data we asked feedback from a human factors expert. He helped us focus our questions a little and told us it was okay to be a little more direct. We discussed the direction we were going to take and for homework individually put our questions through the grinder, to be rearranged on the morrow.

The Design Challenge & Succes Criteria

Design Challenge
We want to make garments which through technology reduce air pollution in mayor cities by 2020.

Succes Criteria
To engage people in the process and have them communicate the importance of cleaning the air.

Beginnings...

The Fashion Rethink Design Group #2 has found each other on common ground and started ideation on our futurevision of a sustainable fashion industry in 2020.

We're interested in three main themes that have interesting ramifications.

1. Smart Clothing
Technofabrics and what this means for sustainable ways. Things like self cleaning, self healing, resilience, light reaction, heat reaction, waste recycling/elimination.

2. System
We're looking into transport and distribution solutions. Slowing down fashion production. Clean production cycles following a cradle to cradle model. Changing the value-chain. Regaining value for consumers.

3. Branding
Limiting choice in respect to branding. Increasing emotional attachement.

As a theme to limit and give direction we decided to take contrast, play and paradox as an inspiration. We'll be updating soon with epic group pictures!