Crossing the boundaries between different cultures

IoT Chengdu Design Workshop, June 2

This time, we invited participants to think about how to enable people from different culture backgrounds to know each other better or how to enable people who came from one culture to another to enjoy the new culture better. The theme was Crossing, which was again adapted from a CHI student design competition.

Design problem and background

In the last few years, smart devices have become more or less standardised in their physical and graphical forms. While new groups of users are constantly emerging, quite a few people still stay away from the benefits of technology.

We are asking you to design a product, application, technology, or service that enable people who are a new and completely unexplored user group in any country to appropriate things and technologies around them.

We ask you to showcase your best abilities of “maker cultures” to build new connections and to make less-voiced cultures be better heard. We ask you to use technology as a material for crafting and tinkering, and to make sure that you solve real problems, empower people in a unique way, and let them express their colours and needs.

Preparation

1.Nice bento boxes were offered.

2. A low-tech social network was established via stickers and colour pens. With this social network, participants became familiar with each others.

3.Participants were asked to think about life changing points in the past 5–10 years. Anything related to physically moving from one place to another or mental statuses changes.

Through this activity, participants’ brainstorming was guided to real life problems.

4.The concept of using persona was explained. The methods of conducting user interview was also introduced. By spending a short period of time on user interview, some personas were created to link the previous found real life problems to an extended and general group of real people.

Design Process

When a real problem of a real group of people was successfully found and defined, the design workshop was further proceeded with two design problems.

Design Problem 1: How to enable geeks to apply their technology into normal daily life?
Design Problem 2: How to deal with being single and lonely?

With various discussion and design activities, two design solutions were formed:

1. A smart cooking pan, which is a showcase of geek’s technical capability.
2. A smart bed, which can connect different lonely people.

These two ideas will be further designed and presented in next design workshop.