How does the process of designing a better product work? To show you, Nightline went to Palo Alto, CA to the designers at IDEO, and gave them the toughest problem we could think of. Take something old and familiar like the shopping cart and completely redesign it in just five days.
Keep reading for parts 2 and 3 of this video…
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Where do new ideas come from? This film is about design strategists and how they identify the right ideas. It was produced by the global innovation consultancy Continuum.
Not unlike some of what we are doing here at CIID…
Define
- Decide what issue you are trying to resolve.
- Agree on who the audience is.
- Prioritize this project in terms of urgency.
- Determine what will make this project successful.
- Establish a glossary of terms.
Research
- Review the history of the issue; remember any existing obstacles.
- Collect examples of other attempts to solve the same issue.
- Note the project supporters, investors, and critics.
- Talk to end-users, that brings the most fruitful ideas for later design
- Take into account thought leaders opinion
Ideate
- Identify the needs and motivations of your end-users (needfinding)
- Generate as many ideas as possible to serve these identified needs
- Log your brainstorming session.
- Do not judge or debate ideas.
- During brainstorming, have one conversation at a time
Prototype
- Combine, expand, and refine ideas.
- Create multiple drafts.
- Seek feedback from a diverse group of people, include your end users.
- Present a selection of ideas to the client.
- Reserve judgment and maintain neutrality.
Choose
- Review the objective.
- Set aside emotion and ownership of ideas.
- Remember: the most practical solution isn’t always the best.
- Select the powerful ideas.
Implement
- Assign tasks.
- Execute.
- Deliver to client.
Learn
- Gather feedback from the consumer.
- Determine if the solution met its goals.
- Discuss what could be improved.
- Measure success; collect data.
- Document.
Right before Easter holiday was the Innovation Lab’s NEXT exhibit/conference in Århus, Denmark where we exhibited Meet the Food You Eat. Several of our classmates exhibiting their own projects (Bunny Bot, CALEN3DAR and Compound Eye) were there as well.
Mimi Son made the above video that covers all the CIID projects and several of the others. Below are photos of some of my favorite projects.
Children playing with a PlayAlive demo
Not the best photo but a really neat project by a Danish company called PlayAlive who make “intelligent playground equipment.” It is essentially a large, playground style jungle-gym equipped with electronic pads (pictured above) that light up and make sounds to create different games. Children have to run and climb around the playground in order to hit the pads. It is sort of like a massive, multi-player Bopit in which kids actually get exercise.
A child playing Remote Impact by Distance Lab
Remote Impact is another computer based game that requires physical activity. It was the developed by the Distance Lab, a research group in Scotland that develops technology and products around the theme of distance. Remote Impact is a boxing game in which opponents fight eachother remotely. The game works by punching a life size silhouette of your opponent as he moves around, and the harder you punch the soft screen, the stronger your virtual punch will be.
Mimi sprays canned smoke on the coughing plant by Kitchen Budapest
The Coughing Plant was my favorite project by Kitchen Budapest eventhough it was probably their simplest. The idea is easy… a sensor inside the plant detects smoke and a hidden speaker makes a coughing noise. They had another version in the form of a picture frame hanging outside the building entrance where all the smokers were, but picture frames don’t breath and plants do. Maybe they could have made a dog collar???
The AfterLife coffin
James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau created AfterLife, a coffin that uses a decomposing body’s biomass to recharge batteries. This was situated next to a similar project (that I assume was by the same artists) that was a motorized sticky fly trap. It was able to collect all of the dead flies and use their bodies to charge a small digital clock.
Before the exhibit opened, Preben Meyer (director of the Innovation Lab) demoed three projects from the exhibit on Good Morning Denmark. One of these was Meet the Food You Eat!
He also brought it on another television show filmed in Århus.
At a self checkout terminal in Copenhagen's central library
Last week we visited Pernille Schultz, head of the Copenhagen Central Library (Hovedbiblioteket), to gain some background knowledge on the Danish library system and it’s current challenges (libraries are one of the topics for our current course on Service Design). To get a better understanding of how libraries worldwide are using digital services, Pernille recommended the blog of Lorcan Dempsey. As it turns out, this blog is actually a great resource for anyone interested in services and networks in general, not just libraries.
One particular article, Always on: Libraries in a world of permenent connectivity, was especially relevant to some of the stuff we have been talking about in school over the past few days.
Keep reading for a summary of Lorcan’s key ideas in this article…
As mentioned before, the topic of the past two weeks has been Social Computing & Sustainability. Jay from Intel gave a brief talk on the idea of social computing and how it relates to some of the system-on-a-chip technologies that Intel may be working with. But one item from that presentation which really stuck out was this Carrotmob video. The video and concept have nothing to do with social computing per se, but I think it can be assumed it wouldn’t be possible to achieve what Carrotmob did without social computing. Showing what websites, mobile phone apps and whatever else were used would not really add anything to this video.
From this point of view and from a sustainability point of view, this video is well worth watching. And from a design point of view, it’s a great example of concept testing, experience prototyping, etc… The concept is designed for large corporations, but they were able to test it in a local market and prove its feasibility.
It makes me think of the project I am currently working on, a video scenario about a government initiative that helps reduce energy consumption. Our video focuses a lot on the touchpoints involved (websites & mobile phone apps). But can it not be assumed that any new, forward thinking service will be utilizing these? I think the Carrotmob video showed us this. So for our video, which as an Interaction Design project requires some of these touchpoints, we really have to think of some creative ways to make them new and fresh.
Tobias showing us energy efficiency projects which he found interesting
We have begun our first “Industry Project” for which we have the privilege of collaborating with Jay Melican, a Design Researcher at Intel’s Digital Home Group. The topic of this two week project is Social Computing for Sustainability and we will be exploring “the roles of the individual and the collective in achieving sustainable behaviors change and effective residential energy/resource management.” I should mention that only half our class is working on the Intel project while the other half is working with DSB - the Danish train company. Not coincidentally, their brief is also about sustainability (read Eilidh’s blog for details about that project).
What I did find coincidental though was that the project I just finished (Meet the Food You Eat) also had to do with sustainability. However I have come across some blog articles tonight that are making me realize what a perfect challenge sustainability is for Interaction Designers.
To paraphrase a blog article that paraphrased Robert Fabricant’s keynote speech at the Interaction Design Association’s recent conference in Vancouver:
Our medium = behavior
Sustainability = a problem of behavior
Sustainability = our problem
It’s an interesting equation and something to think about. A great example of this comes from the design consulting firm Cooper. They have done a service concept called Economizer which is very close to the sort of projects we are talking about right now. But besides being about sustainability, the following videos are also excellent examples of communication, prototyping and interaction design.