3.6 Affinity mapping, Insights and Design directions
We first noted down everything of value that we heard from interviews, at the workshops and noticed during observations.
The next step was to group these into categories based on their affinity.
Initially, we defined remote familied very broadly to include scenarios where the parents are in India and daughter is in US, and when a couple is living together but on different schedules. The affinity map helped us narrow down our target users to people who live apart in terms of distance and time (time difference) which is the parents in India and daughter in US scenario. We selected this group of people as they were affected the most.
We also extracted insights that would eventually lead to the design directions:
No matter families are together or apart, they use the cooking experience to fulfill certain emotional needs such as love and trust.
When they are together, the cooking experience is shared and performed collaboratively. But when they are apart, they mainly rely on describing that experience.
Remote communication is impaired by difficulties in synchronization of time and context and limitation of technology.
People look for secondary activities while performing certain steps within the cooking experience.
We used the insights to come up with our big question:
How might we leverage Mixed Reality in the cooking experience to foster remote family communication?
Based on the insights we drew up 3 potential design directions:
- Provide new channels to share information
We want to explore how we can use MR to share information that cannot be done today. For example, in remote cooking, you can tell the family member to add salt to taste, but you might not know how it should taste in the first place. Or for that matter, clicking pictures of dishes and sharing them is a big thing. But what if you could not only share pictures, but the smell, the texture of food, and even the fancy eating environment that go with it. So we want to explore new ways of sharing such information remotely. - Promote seamless interactions
How can both parties be actively engaged in the cooking experience? Is it a system that gives opportunities for remote collaboration in all stages of the cooking experience. For example, in the buying stage, remote families can share visions across space to co-determine what to put into the cart. Or in the cooking stage, haptic interaction can help remote family members actually co-cook instead of one side giving instructions to the other side. - Create opportunities for conversation
We want remote conversation to happen at the right time. And at the right time can have multiple meanings. Can this system auto record the contextual and time differences of remote family members so that it can synchronize the best moments for conversations?
Or should this synchronization work differently in the sense that, one person can record msgs when they are free and that recorded moment is automatically presented to another person via certain triggers, so that people don’t have to wait for someone to become free to talk to them, but still feel a sense of companionship and bonding.
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