Wayfinding through Central Park — UX Research Pt 1.

Ideation&Prototyping Final Project Process

This seven-week collaborative project will divide you into teams (or individually) to work on exploring, investigating, studying, analyzing, and eventually, ideating and designing interventions for, a real-world social phenomenon. This project is meant to introduce you to the human-centered design process, leading you through the various stages of how designers conduct research and develop novel and innovative interventions, whether in the form of communications, art experiences, products, services, or other things, for people, by people, with people.

This week kicked off our Final Project for Ideation & Prototyping where we had to choose between 370 Jay street or the City as a Space for our area of research.

Contents

#0 team up

#1 brainstorming in class

#2 brainstorming and mapping after class

#3 stakeholder mapping and research methods

Process

#0 Team up

Our group consists of five people who are all interested in the “city as sites”. group members: Yesha Shah, Kaiqing Su, Ruoyun Sheng, Emmy Andrews, and Aala Siddiqi.

#1 brainstorming in class

So the first meeting/discussion we had was an in-class brainstorming. Each of us thought of some ideas, and we wrote them down and elaborated on them a little bit.

Here are some ideas that we finally decided to further explore. We found that parks, subways, and hidden gems were much more interesting than other ones and they all had a lot of content for us to deeper dig in.

#2 brainstorming and mapping after class

As we left from class discussion, we decided to go further into the parks and the hidden gems. Our goal was to find a common place in between parks and hidden gems, an overlapping area that we could probe into both sides.

So, we built these maps on a FigJam board, looking for possible topics. And we found a possible topic which is our current one: Wayfinding Through Central Park while exploring historical sites.

#3 stakeholder mapping and research methods

Since we decided on our topic, the potential stakeholders were the next step that we need to have consent on. We drew a stakeholder map based on directly involved stakeholders and relevant stakeholders.

Week 2 Plan

For the primary research methods, we summed up all of our ideas and thought that doing these research methods in groups of two or three would be better since we were going to have a lot of onsite observations and interviews which would be time-consuming. So, in the following week, we will

1. do some secondary research on central park and the historical sites around or inside of it
2. design the interview questions and the questionnaires;
3. onsite observations
4. affinity diagramming/mapping.