Chapter 3: User Research, Contextual Inquiry and Ideation

“How might we teach kids values of frugality at an age when they are least influenced by consumerist society?”

Published in

Shaping Frugal Futures

5 min readMar 2, 2019

Now, I had defined a direction for my research and intervention exploration:

It becomes harder to make changes in lifestyle from comfort zone to a frugal one when you are grown up in and have already been influenced heavily by the consumerist society(behaviours, habits,etc). The design question now is : “How might we teach kids values of frugality at an age when they are least influenced by consumerist society?” Possible outcomes could be to make use of existing public resources (swings, walls, benches, park space, etc ) to create interactive installations about good frugal values that are fun and educational. Teaching kids these values make them absorb such core beliefs and values for the rest of their lives. Frugal citizens make a frugal Bangalore. Frugal thoughts lead to frugal actions.

A deeper digging through user research (kids) and contextual inquiry was required:

What age group of kids to target?

I was yet to define what exact age group I needed to target. Hence, I did some research in order to answer the same and the questions that arose from the feedback:

Primary research:

Key takeaways from an interview with a school principal:

Kids understand values better when you can show them metaphors.
Through her experience of telling a moral story about anger management, she explained that different age groups of kids have different receptivity level. For example, kids of grade 5,6,7,8 are more likely to understand and be open to grasp values better and are more likely to participate in discussions related to moral stories.

Secondary research:

Key takeaways from secondary research:

Children between ages 7–14 are capable of-

Speculating about future events
Understanding cause and effect
Developing and testing a hypothesis
Reasoning Scientifically
Children below the age of 7 do not understand the logic and consequences of actions

What do they like?

They value acceptance and validation from friends
And tend to enjoy rules and rituals, organized activities

How do they behave? What’s their play method/ritual?

In addition to the help from the above readings, I did live drawing and observed the behaviour of kids that were playing with swings in the children's play area in a park.

Observation informed me that:

They can use playthings in unintended ways
They tend to quickly move on to the next experience/ play
Like to sit around with family and watch too
They can use equipment in unintended ways
They want to show their parents or friends what they find interesting/ what they discovered
They like group play
They like competitive games with rules

Based on information receptivity levels and cognitive development as informed by the above research, I took the age group of kids to be roughly between 7 to 12 years as an age group where imparting values of civic sense through learning cultures could have the most impact. Since the initial context of the study observed kids playing in parks, I proceeded to explore gamified learning experiences.

Customer Journey Map

Making the customer journey map was really useful for me as it painted clear in my mind the idea that gamification could influence habits in an individual (https://charlesduhigg.com/how-habits- work/)

Stakeholder Map

Making the stakeholder map made me realise that while the recreation in parks may be frugal for the visitors, someone still has to bear the cost of maintenance of the park and that is the government. Hence, my future research shall include understanding the maintenance system employed by BBMP.

Field Visits:

To observe how kids interact with outdoor installations, I decided to visit the planetarium which has outdoor interactive science installations and the IT museum, which was visited by all age groups and it had installations about science and technology.