3.20–3.21 Mapping Directions & Brainstorming Ideas.

After having sweet spring break, we were back to our research. To remind, our core question for now is:

“How might we use MR to facilitate communication between an inexperienced young adult and parents who live in different timezones through cooking experience?”

We started ideation by revisiting our three design directions from generative research phase. Then, we stepped back to see them at the big picture in order to decide which direction we should focus on.

1. Provide new channels to share information
“How can we use MR for remote family to share information that cannot be done today in cooking experience, such as the smell, the texture of food, even mood of the kitchen environment?”

2. Promote seamless interactions
“How can we use MR to make remote collaboration in cooking not intrusive?”

3. Create opportunities for conversation
“How can we use MR for remote family to synchronize the best moments for conversations?”

Problems we initially wanted to tackle within current mode of remote communication were unsynchronized context, unsynchronized time in the both making call and cooking and intrusive technology for natural interaction.

By doing the reflection, however, we found another important problem; unbalanced needs for conversation between parties of our target audience. Parents may want to communicate more with their child than the other way around.

This problem in the needs was interesting for us because of a couple of reasons. First, meeting the needs for conversation on both sides is the key to initiate the conversation. This resonates with Bruce’s feedback that we can also think about families who don’t use cooking experience as a medium of their conversation. Second, the dynamic of the needs keeps changing. In the short-term, temporary conditions change the needs. In the long-term, as family get older, child care more about their parent’s food/cooking situation.

To measure where the most impactful intervention point is, we mapped these problems — unsynchronized time/context, unsynchronized interaction, and unsynchronized needs — out on a matrix as below. X-axis of the matrix is our cooking experience stages and Y-axis of it is the degree of the problem.

From the mapping activities, we got three takeaways.

First, there is a huge gap between parents and child’s need to communicating shopping, but the stage has low difficulties to talk. This is where current communication method can deal with if the needs are met. However, bridging the need gap itself is more challenging issue and it should be a facet of our design solution.

Secondly, there is an untapped opportunity area in cleaning stage for passive conversation, such as small talk. Here, we found different natures of conversation while remote co-cooking. passive conversation and active conversation as well. Asking recipe involves an active conversation with practical purpose. This type of conversation is important for family bonding because it gives an opportunity for parents to care their child and to pass down family legacy. Meanwhile, passive conversation when child is not attentive, such as small talks while waiting for a soup boiling or while washing dishes, is also important for family bonding.

Last but most importantly, preparing & cooking is the hardest stage to be synchronized in terms of time/context/interaction, but there is hight needs to talk. This is the great opportunity to design an intervention. So we decided to focus on unsynchronized time/context/interaction as our primary problem to solve in order to support the needs on the both sides.

So we moved on ideating solutions that can bridge the gap between parents’ and child’s needs to communicate. At the same time, we came up with ideas that can synchronize time/context/interaction on the both sides.