Its Morphin’ Time
After last weeks work, we now have a more clear umderstanding of what we can do to increase social interaction.
Expanded Brainstorm
This brainstorm was geared towards expanding on the previous days discussions and ideas. For this to happen, we would have to consider the previous ideas and discussions we had while comming of with more detailed ideas on how we wanted to solve the problem of social interaction.
Compared to previously, this brainstorm was more about quality and specificity of the ideas than about quantity. The focus was on creating a set of solutions that we believed was could help us move along.
Features and Technology from Brainstorming Session
Following the brainstorm, we spend some time explaining the ideas to each other, getting everyone on the same page. We then started evaluating the ideas and figuring out what technologies could be used to make this idea come to life. These technologies were categorised as either being touch or pressure sensing, auditorial feedback or visual feedback, or how we will connect the devices.
Having a lot of different technologies, we voted on which we thought would create the best solution, taking time to give well rounded arguments for why we choose any one particular technology. After three votes per team member, we reached a place where it was now time to come up with final ideas.
From the above technologies and discussion around why we should choose one over the other, we found ourself further defining the scope for our project:
Energising local discovery and communication by incorporating visual indication as wearable technology and tapping into crowd-sourced local data-sharing networks.
Morphology Chart
The morphology chart is basically a method used to generate ideas based on a set of functions that you intend for your final product. As can be seen in the picture below, we have on the left hand axis, the functions that we want our product to include. We want a wearable that is able to connect to the city, know about your interests, and tell you when you are in the vicinity. Out the right hand axis, we then have the different technologies that we believe can give those functions.
The morphology chart helped generate ideas in a analytical and systematical manner, choosing the technology we believed to be the best for the job. This ultimately yielded us with three different ideas (we tried to limit ourslef, because of time limits) that we would now have to further distill into a final concept.
Harris Profile
Now that we have some more concrete ideas, it is time to choose that we will then start prototyping. Using a Harris Profile, we create a graphic representation of the strengths and weaknesses of our design concepts. We are now evaluating our design alternatives against a number of different criteria that is important to the final product, like reactiveness and visibility of the feedback, price and durability of the final product and so on. A four-scale scoring is then used to give point on how strong or weak a concept is in a certain area.
This ended up not helping us to converge on one single concepts, as both design alternatives accumulated the same score. Although it did not help us choose one final concept, it did however help us gain a better insight into where the strength and weaknesses in our ideas are, allowing us to look at these before starting to prototype.
Initial Sketches
After a long day with a lot of brain squeezing we thought it best to sit down, take a break, drink some coffee, listen to some jazz and just try and make some sketches of how we visualised the concept would look like.
After some time, we came to the realisation that we should be studying fashion design instead, so from now on, the theme of this blog will be just that — just joking!
