Week 2 - Day 3

We started the morning by arguing! There was a difference of opinion on how to iterate our concept. Instead of trying to add too many features there was a strong need to try and focus on making the concept stronger as a whole. There weren't any strong heated arguments but the tension was palpable. And so it was decided that we should take a short break, cool down, have some coffee and try to work around the difference of opinion to come to some kind of mutual understanding.

This worked quite well. Working through the problem, facilitated by a caring teammember, we came to a consensus about the path we should take. After listing our focus and voting on the way to proceed we had a clear path ahead and proceeded to present our findings of the research done the evening before.

There was a lot of information to be explained and we spent quite some time talking about the various parts of the research. Each worked form his or her own background to fill an explicit role in the process, and everyone was keen on elevating our concept to the next level. Different prototypes had been made, wireframes designed, important papers explained and ways to see parts of the concept in different perspectives put forth.



With a new focus we went on to create a different persona, one that would explain an important audience for us to develop for. The cityboy of the future was born, he had no kids but a strong materialistic drive and a strong ambition to be succesful. To create for a user that would be difficult to reach we devised a strong incentive and a way to incorporate his lifestyle with our concept.

Because of this we could redesign our product to better fit the needs of the persona. We could leave some of the functionality behind and simplify the concept to be able to better communicate it come friday. A talk with Barnabas also provided some valuable insight that we felt was of great help.

We had decided to go out and buy some props for our final prototype to communicate to our stakeholders (in this case, our tutors, press and dignitaries from the designcity Kolding), instead of using cardboard, plastic and wood. But before this possible there was a short lecture by Barnabas we had to wait for. In the meantime we talked about envisioning the final presentation and came up with a framework for this. The lecture was quite interesting and inspiring, it focussed on some key points we should have a strong focus on and I think came at exactly the right time in exactly the right dose. Another helpfull addition came from a journalist who told us about the 'press pyramid' of information disclosure. We decided to follow this model as a strong guideline.

We went out into the streets and visited secondhand shops for materials to build our final prototype with and found some good bags and garments we could redesign into our futuristic concept.





More talk of presentation ensued. We decided on a look and feel, a certain style and were sure to reach consensus before moving on through the different phases in our exploration of possiblities. Other topics of discussion included: the timing of the videoclip we were going to be making; the structure of the information disclosure; colours and minimalistic style; animations in the video; style of the garment vs. style of the video.

While the ladies were busy designing the garments the boys put together a storyboard taking the viewer throught the user journey by treating the most important touchpoints of the concept. After doing this we got together again to iterate both processes and revamp some parts where necessary. There was some confusion at a certain point that related to the earlier argument, but we were able to quickly work through this and keep focus. Much fun was had while we thought up weird names for our concept.

And so we worked, and worked, deep into the night...

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.

Week 2 - Day 1

The weekend did bring respite for some but not for all, and under loud yawning the process continued and was elevated to greater hights. We got up early to prepare for the presentation and print out some pictures to help visualise our concepts to our tutors and peers. It was also a chance for a good breakfast. I know the cooks from the designschool must love us because they know how to put food in our bellies like only our moms could.

The concepts that were presented by all the the different groups were interesting, fun and inpiring in many ways. Questions and comments were helpful and pointed many people to interesting ways and directions to look and experience. As a group we presented our concepts one by one and helped each other out where nescesarry, which worked quite well. The feedback focussed mainly on ways to eliminate pollution through technical means, but the tutors wanted to see us go even further into a science fiction world where everything could be possible.

After this pleasant morning round of presentations some wonderful food was set out for us, which was immensely enjoyed. With full bellies we jumped into User Journey's. Toke gave an insightful presentation on this methodology and we started creating some great journey's through our future vision. I guess we like crafting and building on the feedback to go deeper into our vision we each created seperate scenario's to work out what was in our head and then communicated this amongst each other to help build out the journeys even further.

At around five we decided to call it a day, since there was a film planned for us at the local movie theatre. Children of Men posed an epic doomsday scenario for us to be inspired by and it may have influenced our visualisation of the user journeys even further.

More fantastic food awaited us at the school for a late dinner with wine, beer and great conversation. A day to remember :)

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.