It’s over – and we have one last thing to share with you:
The clickable prototype from our concept video. It is made in axure, and at times we were afraid that aiming for this level of fidelity would cause us to miss the deadline. We are glad that we stuck with it.
Enjoy
After a couple of very busy hours and an Inspiration Card Workshop with some selected users, we decided to create four personas, to represent our users. Since it is getting late here in Denmark, we are not able to do any further workshops or testing with ‘live’ users and this is where we can use our personas as a handy interaction design technique. We made four different personas, representing a quite normal household. We tried to give them different characteristics, which were all plausible in a normal four-person family.
The point of using personas is to set up some fictionalized settings, in which we are able to test our concepts. We feel comfortable using personas now, since our knowledge on the domain has been greatly increased over the last couple of hours. (Pruitt & Grudin, 2003)
Below we have inserted our four current personas:
References
Pruitt, J. and Grudin, J. (2003). Personas: Practice and Theory. ACM.
An Inspiration Card Workshop is a collaborative method for combining findings from domain studies. (Halskov & Dalsgaard, 2006, p. 1) We presented the subject “3D Food printing” for our test group, without telling them anything about how, when or where to use this technology. We gave them a bunch of domain cards, representing places or experiences where the technology could be used. We also gave them a bunch of technology cards, representing a wide range of different technologies, which could be used together with the food printer. We gave them sketching materials and asked them to draw and write any concepts they could come up with. After a while, where they created some different concepts, we gave them some constraints, trying to make them look in other directions. We kept handing out and removing constraints, to change their mindset and forcing them collaborate in creating different concepts. As mentioned in an earlier blog post the idea of imposing constraints is to enhance creativity, the so-called creativity constraints (Onarheim & Biskjaer, 2013, p. 8). It is about the finding the sweet spot where our users is most creative. So if the we felt the users were over-constrained we would remove a constraints etc. Through participatory design we were able to achieve a common consensus between our users and us as designers – which Müller calls the third space in HCI. (Müller, 2003, p. 10) A space where we as designers actively use the knowledge of our users to develop a concept.
Below we have inserted a timelapsed version of the workshop, which gives a pretty good view of how it all went by.
The main points that they kept focusing on and came back to a lot of times was the following:
Halskov, K. and Dalsgaard, P. (2006). Inspiration card workshops. pp.2–11.
Müller, M. (2003). Participatory design: the third space in HCI. Human-computer interaction: Development process, pp.165–185.
Onarheim, B. and Biskjaer, M. (2013). An Introduction to ‘Creativity Constraints’. ISPIM Conference.
We performed an interview with a person within our user group, family. The interview was conducted via telephone in Danish using Apple’s FaceTime app, where you see each other face-to-face. The interview was done through the telephone due to time pressure, both from our part, but also from the interviewed. A telephone interview gave us the possibility for rapid responses to a structured questionnaire. (Kvale 1995, p. 291) There is some general problems about interviewing through the telephone – insecurity, suspicion and other things (Kvale 1995, p. 291) – however the person interviewed had a relation to the interviewer. The reason for the interview was to narrow down further and getting towards a concept.
The name of the interviewee is Maja, she is 28 years old and lives in Aarhus, Denmark, with her husband and child who is 1 year and 2 months old. The subject of the interview was health. She does spinning and running whenever she has the possibility. We asked Maja if she cooks at home – to that she answered: “I’m actually never making dinner. It’s rare that it is me who cooks – usually it’s my husband. Maybe twice a week.”. We moved onto general habits for dinner where to she answered they never ate pre-made food because they wanted to know what the food contains exactly and that they didn’t eat out. When asked about healthy food she answered that it was very important for them – and they try to eat very varied at home and have seasonal vegetables.
These informations are very interesting for us, as Maja is a part of our potential user group. She is really aware of what they are eating at home, which is useful for our further concept development.
Majas child gets supplements in form of something called D-drops. It is vitamin D, which is suggested by the hospital to give to children until they are two years old.
The supplements is also another interesting thing. Maja didn’t mention any problems about making her child take it – maybe because it was a fluid. If supplements can be added into the food we are printing, it gets us away from the negative connotations that surround pills.
Even though Maja does not cook that often she admitted that she actually enjoys cooking. This is a factor we also have to take into consideration with the 3D printer. For some people it might be ‘more handy’ and less time consuming to have a 3D printer prepare the dinner. For others however preparing a dinner is something you enjoy doing.
We moved onto a new subject within food – third party advisors. We asked Maja how she was feeling about getting advice from third parties. First we gave the example of a doctor asking her about her weight or healthy living. She was very positive about doctors giving advice as long as they do it in a polite way. Actually she expected doctors to give this kind of advice. Then we asked about advice from a person working for the local government (municipality). Here she was not interested in the advice – and actually found it intimidating that they would ask such a question.
As a third party interfering with food we found out that there is a big difference who gives the advice. Something we as designers have to be careful about. Our product will not have the same ethos as a doctor – and we therefore have to be aware of which informations/tips we are pushing to the users. However – combined with the idea of nutrition, vitamins or even medicine as part of the meal – the final product could be a potential tool for doctors.
We then moved into asking about the use of apps in relation to her health. Maja answered she once used the app Lifesum which counts calories very closely. You can scan a grocery – and it will show you what it contains. Maja gave the example that if you had a cake for dinner it could tell you: “Hey – maybe you should eat a bit less for dinner tonight.” Furthermore it was possible to add your fitness routines into the app.
The idea of counting calories, adding them up and giving advice is an interesting idea we already had into consideration. That one of our potential users have actually used this app is of course a huge plus.
Kvale, S. (1996). Interviews. 1st ed. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, pp.289-292.
From the outset we have tried to design our own design process. A large part of the theoretical basis for this is based on Löwgren and Stolterman’s (2004) idea of vision, operative image and specification.
“The three abstraction levels of the design process influence each other in a fully dynamic dialectical process.” (Löwgren and Stolterman, 2004, p. 17). The design process is by no means a linear process and we constantly jump between the micro and macro level where we interchangeably focus on the whole and the details in a dynamic process. (Löwgren and Stolterman, 2004, p. 16).
(Löwgren and Stolterman, 2004, p. 17.)
The basic idea is that the design process starts when an idea begins to take shape. The process continues until you outline concrete specifications that make up the foundation for a construction or building a product. The vision can be seen as the first organizing principle that guides the process and helps carry it forward (Löwgren and Stolterman, 2004, pp. 17-18). The next step is the operative image that is the first externalization of the vision, which is where the vision and it eventually develops into a specification that leads to the final product (p. 19-20). After specification is done, the construction of a prototype or product can begin.
In order to move from a vision through an operative image to a specification we use five overall design phases outlined by Löwgren and Stolterman (2004). They outline five overall parts or phases in a design process that goes through inquiry, exploration, composition, assessment and coordination. Inquiry can roughly be said to be a research phase, whereas you in the exploration phase examine the possible outcomes and solutions to the design problem. In the composition fase you increasingly use techniques to move from vision to operative image.
In the assessment phase you critically examine and evaluate the concepts and ideas we have produced. Coordination can be said to be a meta phase involves methods and techniques to facilitate the design process. (Löwgren and Stolterman, 2004, p. 64-65). The process is in no way linear and you jump between different phases in a dynamic and iterative process.
At this point in time we are half-way through the 24 hour challenge. Upon reading the design brief we immediately formed an initial vision which we have since developed and worked on specifying into an operative image. Our initial inquiry fase consisted of netnographic research methods with data collection on the internet (Kozinets, 2010) and we have also moved through exploration and composition fases involving methods such as Bad Ideas 3.0 (Silva, P., 2010) and brainstorming through and categorization of ideas through Affinity Diagramming (Snyder, 2003). We constantly iterate meaning we have done further research and we constantly asses our work, insights and findings. In order to move further along the process of generating an operative image, we plan on doing an inspiration card workshop in a couple of hours (Halskov & Dalsgaard, 2006).
Documentation and reflection through blogging
We are relying on our WordPress blog as a documentation as well as a reflection tool. We are documenting our ongoing process on our online blog https://sonsofive.wordpress.com. We document so we and the reviewers of OzCHI can get an overview of our design process and see how we achieved our results. Towards the end of the design process our blog will hopefully function as a soft draft for the paper that we are to hand in. However, the blog’s function as a collaborative tool between the Sons of Ive group members is just as important. We use the blog to categorize and specify our thoughts and ideas and negotiate about central aspects of the design process so we can be sure we are all on the same page and have a shared design experience.
The blog becomes a way to initiate what Schön calls reflection-on-action (Smith, 2001, p. 12) as a way to evaluate our work at all stages of the design process, and in this way live up to Schön’s idea of the reflective practioner that Löwgren and Stolterman also draw heavily on and use an integral part of their design process that we are using as a framework for our design process (Löwgren and Stolterman, 2004, p. 60). Through the blog we negotiate a uniform and suitable framing of the design situation instead of having different conceptions and a really messy situation (Schön, 1987, p. 4).
References
Halskov, K. & Dalsgaard, P. (2006): Inspiration Card Workshops. In Proceedings of DIS 2006.
Kozinets, R. (2010). Netnography, pp.58-73. 1st ed. Los Angeles, Calif.: SAGE.
Löwgren, J. and Stolterman, E. (2004). Thoughtful interaction design. 1st ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Schön, D.A. (1987): Educating the Reflective Practitioner
Silva, P. (2010). BadIdeas 3.0: a method for creativity and innovation in design. pp.154–162.
Smith (2001) : Donald Schön: learning, reflection and change pp. 1-19.
Snyder, C. (2003). Paper prototyping. 1st ed. San Francisco, Calif.: Morgan Kaufmann, Elsevier Science.
Before shooting the video bits for mini challenge #2 (we are excited about the results!!), we have completed a quick Bad Ideas 3.0 workshop (Silva, 2010) with the sole purpose of diverging our thoughts about the domain before we start preparing for our planned Inspiration Card Workshop later this afternoon. We managed to come up with a bunch of bad ideas and turned them upside down to reveal new aspects about the domain. We are now working on recruiting potential users for the workshop on short notice, while we begin preparations of the inspiration cards and edit our music video for mini challenge #2.
References
Silva, P. (2010). BadIdeas 3.0: a method for creativity and innovation in design. pp.154–162.
Our sweet co-student, Rikke, brought us breakfast and we are having a little design-break. The mood is still high!
sonsofive 