Research Kick Off: Stair Aware

I am reminded of a conversation I once had with Hugh Dubberly, where he framed design research as it stands usually in professional practice. I wont quote him directly, because I don’t have a word for word recall. However, essentially he made the point that we all want to imagine that ethnographic research is where all the ideas come from. However, he noted that almost always there was an existing idea and research is used to validate and sculpt that idea into what should be built. In keeping with that typical flow, I walked in to doing a literature review and secondary research with some ideas in the can. I have been working Stair Aware for about 8 months or so part time and so I can make some decent abductions. With that said, there is so much that hasn’t been figured out. In example, whether this is a commercial product or consumer product as there is market potential for both with the R&D that has already happened.

The area I initially dug in on and started researching was behavior change in interoperable IoT. There was a good amount there to sift through and I have so much reading to still do on that subject matter, but Christina Wodtke channeled me into the stairs, which is the environment the product is for. I started to look into behavior change in stairs, stairs and kids, stairs and elderly, and stairs with lights. I began to remember questions I had along the way. What about those applications the potential manufacturing partners told us about like movie theatres and fire exits? How could you gamify stairs? What are the lighting issues with stairs and is there standard code for that? What would happen if you used sound with the stairs interactions? Could we potentially unlock music tunes or audio feedback?

Health is other piece that has come up, that I haven’t really thought about for a long time. Stairs are a great work out and I know there is a bunch of stuff wrapped up with behavior in stairs. I walked the studio of Fit Bit a few years back and the design group spent most of the conversation talking about designing for behavior change and talking about users walking the stairs at night to hit their step goals. Christina told me a story about a friend who removed his risk for diabetes by walking stairs and changing his diet.

At this point I have about 75 scholarly journal sources and about 15 books. There is quite a bit of reading to do before I come to any early stage conclusions. However, the questions have woken me up a bit from the making and I am excited to answer them!