'Pimp My Idea' Exercise

Today our class merged with Stream D and got in groups of four teams to share our three developed concepts and receive feedback. Our group really liked all three of our ideas which was difficult when we were told that they had to pick one they thought we should carry on with. The majority vote was very close but our 'Hi-Five Cam' idea won. We then had to pass our concepts round the circle of teams to get our ideas 'Pimped'. We got some helpful and exciting suggestions and we incorporated some of them into our journey map that we produced at the end of class to support our concept.

Ex-Change Week 5

Today we met in our Ex-Change groups for the second time. We went round the table and showed each other what we had been up to since we had last met. I was able to give helpful comments/critique to the girls who study Fashion and Textiles, but unfortunately for those of us who do VCD and for the boy who does Industrial it felt like there was nothing much we could ask for critique on as we had all handed in this week.

When it got to my turn I showed the group my team's dossier (as the audio on our video was too quiet in the crowed environment) and read them the key points/insights that we had came to. I then reflected on how we thought we had gone for our presentation and hand in and where we are going to go from here. I ended by showing them the ideas that my team and I had come up with during our rapid ideation session in class today and asking whether they could think of any design concepts that might answer our provocation - or if they could think of any exemplars from real life.

One of the girls liked the idea of something that encourages interaction in the form of a game, and she used the example of giant chess in the CBD in Christchurch. I had already thought of this example myself - although the giant chess on a footpath that I have seen is on Stewart Island. I do like the idea of games though; what are some other games that could be turned into something on the street? The same girl also said that she could imagine something that you would have to hit or stomp on to activate, and she suggested I look at examples from Vivid Sydney. Another person suggested that we could force people to stand beside each other or sit next to each other etc, like that chair that was designed at Massey a few years ago where someone had to sit on the bottom seat in order for someone to be able to climb up the ladder and sit on the top, or else the chair would fall over.

Rapid Ideation

Today in class we did a rapid ideation exercise in our teams. This was a lot of fun and even though most of our ideas were pretty ridiculous and not very practical at least we have got the ball rolling - and we have also gotten all of those terrible ideas out of our heads!

Brief

Hannah, Farren and I have decided to stay as a team as we think that we work really well as a group and we are keen to see what we can produce together.

We were interested in a few other briefs but when we went back to have a second look and a more detailed read of them they weren't on Stream, so that solidified our choice to stick with our own brief. We are quite invested in our brief as we have been working on it for so many weeks and we are interested to see how creative we can get with our solution to our provocation.

Formative Assessment Presentation

Today we presented our script and video in front of our Stream and one other Stream in a lecture theatre in Block 4. The first challenge was to find the lecture theatre as it wasn't one we had ever been to before and Block 4 is not somewhere we frequent. Once we found the theatre I was pleasantly surprised by how small and intimate it was as I had been worrying about it being very large and intimidating.

Even though I try to mentally prepare myself to not feel too nervous leading up to public speaking, because we were one of the last ones on the predetermined list to present I had started to feel ill and shaky by the time we finally got up in front of everybody. Luckily I managed to make it through my parts of the script without a hitch and in time with the video. It was helpful that we had split the script up between us so that we got small breaks between each of our speaking parts.

People seemed to enjoy our video - even laughing in parts, although someone did comment that the video clips were so captivating that they forgot to listen to what we were saying! The only thing that went a tad wrong during our presentation was that Farren had to turn up the sound half way through as we realised the city street noises were very quiet and the audience probably couldn't hear them. Also, unfortunately people were clapping too loudly during our credits to hear the amusing penguin noises we had included.

The best part of presentations today, apart from seeing/hearing the amazing work our peers have been up to, was the lollies that Tristam supplied.

Preparing For The Presentation/Hand-In

We edited our dossier and video for presentation based on the critique that we received from Donald and Tristam on Friday. We then recorded ourselves performing our presentation script and made a copy of our video that had this over the top for marking/moderation purposes, as we know they are not going to record our actual presentation. We had fun recording ourselves and it only took a few takes to get through the whole script correctly and on time - although we might need to practice more for the actual presentation!

Farren and Hannah printed the cover of our dossier at Ink Digital while I printed the inside pages of the dossier at uni. After cutting off the white edges, we then used a binding technique that Donald had shown us an exemplar of in class on Friday to bind our pages together. This involved using double sided tape to stick the inside edge of the pages together and then covering the spine with black tape to finish. I found this interesting as I have never bound anything before and I really like the final result.

I am not worried about our hand-in and presentation tomorrow, but I'm sure as it gets nearer the time for us to stand up in front of everyone and speak I will be feeling very nervous!

W4S2 Class

Today we showed both Donald and Tristam (separately) our dossier and performed our presentation for them. They both seemed to enjoy what we had so far but they also both had some helpful tips and critiques to help us move our work to the next level. I feel happy and confident at where we are with preparing for Tuesday - especially considering a lot of people I know in other Streams are very worried about how they are going to have everything ready for presentation and hand-in.

Presentation Script

We initially pulled the best bits straight out of our dossier to make a script for our presentation, but Farren had the good idea to make the script less formal and to nod to the videos more, in order to make our presentation more conversational and gain more empathy.

We have assigned each of us one of our three personae to read during the presentation. This means that we are all equally participating and also that it is easier for our audience to understand which persona we are talking about each time.

Style For Dossier

We were originally going to use both photographs/videos and illustrations for our presentation and dossier, but something Donald said to us off-handedly on Tuesday struck me - was there a reason for using both? Could we not articulate our metaphor just fine with only one? When I brought up my concerns with my teammates they agreed and, although we were sad to cut the lovely illustrations of our personae that Farren had done, it made sense to go down the photography for our dossier and video for our presentation route as we had a lot more material available to us without having to spend time on more illustrations or even animations.

More Secondary Research

Now that we have our final provocation; 'How might we facilitate humour on city streets to encourage unexpected and fun moments of connection that reduce stress?', I felt that we needed to include in our dossier some solid facts that backed up our idea of using humour to de-stress people. I therefore did more secondary research, this time about humour and how it can reduce stress. I also looked up some readings on stress in business/office workers that we could use in our dossier to back up why we have chosen to focus on them as our target audience.

W3S2 Class

We showed Donald our first draft visual brief today. He was able to confirm with us that we are allowed to continue with three user profiles but said that it would be wise to only have one 'How might we...' question/provocation that could answer all three users' needs. We want to continue with our three profiles as it allows us to show the range within our 'business men and women' audience, and also how three different situations and insights could be solved by one solution. We synthesised our large pool of 'How might we...' questions into one final provocation that addressed all of our user profiles. Our final question is also based on the insights we had on our observation trip to Lambton Quay.

At the end of class we laid our work out on the table and then had the opportunity to go around and look at everyone's work from all of the VCD Streams. It was great to be able to see what everyone else is up to and how everyone is responding to the three readings differently. I personally feel like our class/stream has been more focused on producing quality text elements rather than thinking about visual elements yet, which is very different from the other classes. I am glad that we haven't been pushed to look at the visual side of the presentation and dossier yet as I feel like we have been boiling down our ideas to a real gem, and that we will then be able to focus on the visuals without having to return to the text. It is interesting to see how classes all doing the same project and working in relatively the same space can be doing things very differently.

'How might we...' Questions (Provocations)

In our team meeting we produced seven questions for each of our three user personae using these prompts:

Increase The Good
Remove The Bad
Explore The Opposite
Question An Assumption
Go After The Adjective
Look For Unexpected Resources
Look For Similar Environments + Create An Analogy

This was helped us start to think of what we actually wanted to change about the city streets in the CBD and what we wanted to alter about our users' journeys. The seven prompts made us think about our insights about each user and their journey from many different angles. We ended up coming up with  a whole pool of relevant and good quality 'How might we' questions/provocations that we would have never have thought of without the prompts.

Point-of-View Statements

Today in class we were given a worksheet which walked us through generating point-of-view statements. This was very helpful as it helped us refine our target audience and articulate our insights in clear statements that will help lead us to provocations. I really liked doing this task as I felt that we had chosen our target audience and had exposed some of their needs through doing user journeys, but we hadn't yet really defined exact users and the situations they would find themselves in that we could target. Now we have a clear picture of who our users are and where we could target them/their context.

Observing People

Today my teammates and I went down onto Lambton Quay and observed our target audience in the part of the city that we had identified as the most stressful place. This was an interesting exercise as it helped show us how people behave in the space, any habits people have when they are navigating through it etc. This also helped confirm some of the theories/insights we had discussed through our empathy and journey maps. It was also nice just to immerse ourselves in the situation we are thinking of designing for.