#4 Reflection
During this summer project, I’ve experienced a whole design process from research to the development of the probe. Our team has completed to build a Ezi-Worm, a simplified worm farm. The aim of this post is to think back across the process we have followed and reflect on some aspect of the process that I felt was most valuable. I’ll talk about how we finished this project in the following part.
Before we start a project, the first thing is to understand the what we are trying to find. From the project brief, we could know:
This project is required to explore an alternative view of smart cities where the design of the city is for its citizens needs rather than corporations and industry. We will need do this by augmenting a community garden to support the needs of the people who use or might use that garden.
The problem was that I had no idea what’s smart city and community garden, so we did online research to figure out the definition and try to find people’s needs in a garden. By analyzing several case studies, we tried to discover what kind of technology can be used and some insights in these cases. Then we’ve concluded the characteristic of the smart city and community garden by using the method of card sort(see Fig.2).
Based on the human values that we decided, we could have inspiration to come up with a concept related to this project. Our final concept, called Ezi-Worm which is technology probe to simplify the process of fertilization by making use of the food scraps, was created in this way as we make sure one human value that users are willing to make contribution to the garden.
But before we develop a prototype, even a low fidelity prototype, user research can’t be ignored. One unsuccessful part of our design is that few participants took part in the first design workshop, so we fail to obtain useful information from our target users. When conducting our user test by using a low fidelity prototype, we’ve found that our product in some way is not needs of our target users. Fortunately, there is still some helpful feedbacks. For example, these people face disability problem. This gives us a direction to consider how to help them when gardening. By using high-tech devices to simplify the gardening process would be a solution to this problem. This is also follow one of our focus to connect community and sustainability. We’ve spent about a week to learn a new technology, the Particle Photon as a microcontroller for our project as we need to how to control the sensor to collect data by programming. It was really an interesting process to built the physical prototype step by step.
A good product can’t be exit without ideation.The result of the evaluation has helped us know the problems that exists in our design, which gave us insights for the future development. For instance, in the next step, we need to ensure the accuracy of the detector, explore renewable energy, visit the real gardens and interview our target users and so on.
Overall, this project helps me have a deeper understanding of the design process(see Fig.3). During the research process, we used several methods to explore people’s needs in the garden, such as interviews, observations and academic research. Based on the result of this research, a concept, EZ-Worm, was formed to satisfy a few of the requirements in regards to the insights gathered from this research. During the development part, we have an access to learning an easy method that can collect data to the database. It is important to evaluate the prototype, thus knowing how to ideate the concept.
