Putting Our Heads Together
Ideation & Prototyping: Design Research Project
For this week of our design research project, we began by presenting our findings and information to the group using the “Feedback Gallery” method. We added images representative of our research, as well as our “How, Might We” statement which stated: “How might we create a step by step toolkit for fostering empathy, providing prompts, and improving the initial check-in experience of trans/nb/gq patients.”
We received some good feedback in that the use of the word “toolkit” implied designing multiple touchpoints and focused on an institutional level. We also heard about the ubiquity of apple watches in the nursing profession and the variety of check-in experiences at different institutions.
We met as a team and discussed the feedback received. It made it clear that our HMW statement could use some refining and we were ready for some ideation.
We decided to meet later in the week and present three ideas each. I worked on creating some ideas including a customizable e-ink name tag patients can receive upon check-in, an AR overlay for medical employees that label patients and information so they can be properly identified, the third was a QR code scanner that allowed patients to check themselves in via their phone and fill out any personal information before being seen.
The group came together and presented our ideas. Surprisingly, the team had mostly similar themes for our ideas. We grouped the ideas based on medium and themes. We eventually narrowed them down to a subset of sketches & ideas that revolved around the identification, specifically name-badges and the check-in process. These shared themes of physical objects, information gathering, and customization. We also asked some other questions like “how does this help humanize patients?” Or “How does this help people feel more holistically included?”.
While we weren’t expressly looking to create something technological, it seems that having a technical component creates the familiar affordances to capture more human expression.
We worked together to narrow the scope to these structures and allow us as a team to generate new ideas. We felt as if the feedback was beneficial in showing us to narrow our scope but we feel the major amount of our research is pointing towards remedying the initial check-in experience for gender-expansive people.
These questions are guiding our future mock-ups this week. I’m excited to see what the rest of the team comes up with and how we can use them together. This week hopefully we can move into more structured prototyping and feedback and start to iterate on the double diamond model.
