Sprint 1: Exploring Future Industry Landscape
After a great kick-off meeting with InterDigital, we went on a journey to plan out and conduct research.
Second Secondary Research
First, as promised, the client provided us with internal documents about the future technological landscape, industry landscape, and usage explorations. These materials give a breakdown of the development and opportunities of 6G. These insights were comprehensive enough to answer most preliminary questions in our desk research. We then gathered our responses to the materials and a few remaining questions to compile a refined list of questions to send to our client, mostly about InterDigital’s take on these materials.
Industry Matchmaking
However, most of our insights took the network developers’ perspective, which means most use cases mentioned are projected from trends instead of generated from the users. As practitioners of human-center design, 6G seems like a topic with so much transformational potential that it lacks a focus on concrete user problems.
Bly and Churchill’s article on design methods caught our eyes with the sub-title: technology in search of users. The proposed method is matchmaking between technology affordances and user domains. Once a match is identified, we will be able to proceed with traditional human-centered design.
Based on extensive secondary research, we quickly came up with a list of affordances of 6G. Then, we set out with a number of industries/domains mentioned in the internal materials and brainstormed a few ones. After filling out every correlation between affordance and domain, we voted on the ones in which we see the most opportunities. The winners at that stage were telemedicine (mental health), entertainment, and games.
Later, we confirmed the activity results with our client. Since InterDigital mainly focuses on technologies with mass adoptions (e.g., ubiquitous video compression algorithms), we pivoted one of our preferences from telemedicine to smart cities.
We gladly announce that Smart Environment, Entertainment, and Games are our focus domains. These will be the lenses to help us investigate users’ problems, pain points, and needs as a proxy for the abstract concept of the next-gen network.
Research Planning
After the research activities, we can finally define our research methodologies comfortably. Within the context of our three domains of interest, we aim to identify user behavior, patterns, and unmet needs in everyday life. Then, by investigating the future trend in these domains, we want to identify the overlap between 6G domains and the users. We want to evaluate the potential impacts of emerging technologies on users’ lives and their reactions to our later design solutions during the process.
So, what are the next steps! Although we already pinpoint specific domains, they are still pretty broad for effective user research. Take smart cities as an example; there are many tiny aspects we can poke into — public transportation, safety, and any other service available in the city. What exactly are the experiences we are looking at? This is why we want to approach users with artifacts to direct the conversation. We intend to generate some storyboards from our team’s preliminary imaginations of the future state.
Of course, our aim is not to sell these storyboards. The design is not yet grounded in user-centered research. Based on experiences from last year’s capstone team, negative feedback on potential risks was the most helpful for them. During the speed dating sessions for the storyboards, we will be more excited to learn why they wouldn’t want some of the features we proposed in the future state. We hope this activity will expand into a conversation from which we can inform our following steps for user research.
