Explore and Innovate

Three ideas and initial prototyping

Our general direction

From our research and the constraints of the building policies, we decided to focus our solutions to a more passive interaction. We want to try some different ideas on delivering messages on the door, which has two advantages. 1) people feel more comfortable putting things up on their own doors as it is a still part of people’s “comfort zones” 2) people do notice others’ doors 3)having things on the door DOES make people feel more welcomed

Idea 1 — “let your neighbors get to know you”

Idea 2 — my fav song this week

Idea 3— Knock on my door if you need…

Feedback:

Overall, at this stage we received a lot of positive feedback for our proposed solutions. People thought we brought an innovative physical approach to creating community and appreciated our visual language as a whole. Several people thought these solutions could work within a bigger system, so perhaps our solution is not narrowed down to only one of these. The only concept that faced some confusion was the cassette tape on the door idea, which made sense along with the storyboard, but if we were to implement it for real, would probably require some additional information on the doors. People did especially like the physicality of this solution, though.

Some more negative feedback we received was around the fact that all of our ideas centered around interactions with the door and not another space or tactic. While we understand that our solutions might seem narrow, our decision to focus on the door and identifying individuals in their space was deeply informed from our research and in-person trials leading up to this stage. Had we shown our medium post or research before this, perhaps the response would’ve been different. Solutions not dependent on doors also rely a lot on community spaces that not every complex might have, so if we did go down that route this is something to keep in mind.

A suggestion that was made by a few people was to try out these solutions in a dorm-like space. While we have been focusing on spaces with young people outside of the university setting, it might be worth considering or proposing these solutions also enter a space on campus, or perhaps we need to take extra caution in our wording and visual language to avoid this association.

As a whole, we feel good about our overall direction after the silent desk crit, and know that in the future when we present our newest solutions it might be important to disclose more about how we reached this point and the community or space that it exists in.