IDEO & Acumen NovoEd Human Interaction Design Course

What we did

We decided to focus on an issue which was close to home – and something we all felt affected us – public transportation. The topic we finally settled on was “How can we promote creativity (in London), to people on their way in to work (on public transport) ?”

Our team would meet once weekly, on weekends or after work/study hours. The first part of the process was to get our Assumptions & Prior knowledge recorded. We did this individually, and came to the next meeting with notes to discuss. As we defined and discussed the areas we knew about, it highlighted the areas that we felt we needed to do more research on. During the project we carried out interviews with users and experts, in-context and analogous observation, group knowledge assimilation and synthesis.

Methods

Next, we chose the Research methods we would use from the toolkit, and went out in the field to do the work. The interviews were one of the highlights of the project, and included “Open, general” questions and “Go deep” questions.

For example – a typical “Open” question would be: “How do you usually travel in to work” – but a “Go deep” question would be “If you could travel in to work in any way imaginable, how would you do it?”

… this gave us insights into not only the practical aspects of our users commute, but also allowed them to explore the question creatively, while giving us their feedback.

Research

We interviewed a variety of stakeholders – “Experts” and people who worked at Tube and Train stations. This was accompanied by observation sessions (In-Context and Analogous) at various locations (tube and train stations, bus stops, a GP Surgery, Restaurants, Bars, Gyms and Coffee-shops).

We then got together again as a group and described each interview to the other members of the team – noting the ‘main’ points on post-it notes. We also received insights from some of the Experts we had interviewed – such as a Kindergarten teacher. These insights were incredibly useful throughout the project. We found that by applying this concept and having someone actively drawing, it encouraged more participation from the public. We would plan to hire real artists to work on the project if it was taken past the prototype stage.

Ideation phase

From these insights, we formed our “How might we…” questions. We used these five questions as fuel for a creative brainstorm.

Some of the ideas had already been forming in our minds during the interview process, and the problem-statements were really useful in focusing the brainstorming and tying it to the research. We followed a democratic voting process to whittle down the best ideas, and chose a top three. This was definitely the most enjoyable part of the process, but it was really tough to let some of the ideas go.

We settled on the winner: The Big Art Wall.

The ‘Big Art Wall’ is a large scale, interactive wall space in tube/train stations (or possibly other public spaces) which encourages commuters to draw/write on the wall enabling them to be part of a collective and creative experience with other commuters and commissioned celebrity/ local artists.

Storyboarding

We identified eight sections within our storyboard, which describe the variety of possible interactions our users would have with our prototype, and the phases the prototype would go through, namely: Awareness, Initial use, Interaction, Social media sharing, Re-use/recycle, Display work, “End of Day” projection and Replacing art-boards.

We chose to protoype the “Initial use” phase of our storybord as we wanted to find out if the idea would actually be welcomed by commuters, or if they would be too shy/busy/uninterested to participate in the project.

Prototyping

We chose to prototype on a large white sheet of paper and provided colourful pens (attached with string to the wall) for people to draw with.

The prototype was designed to be in four quadrants of a circle – each quadrant having less and less drawing “guidance” for users: 1st quadrant lots of more detailed drawing started; 2nd quadrant some drawing and lots of “join the dots”; 3rd quadrant more abstract “join the dots”; 4th quadrant completely blank for free drawing.

Concentric circles were drawn in to provide additional guidance. We were inspired by artists such as Henri Rosseau and Wassily Kandinsky – as they often painted nature and natural subjects in colourful, often abstracted ways.

Testing prototype

We tested the prototype at Old Street Station in Shoreditch, London. This was because of the proximity of the station to our workshopping location, as well as the fact that the station is in Central London – which meant there would be plenty of foot traffic.

We spent one hour testing – from 17:40 until 18:50, and noted down any activities in an observation spreadsheet. We would wait until commuters were finished drawing, often walking away, and then ask them some open questions about what they liked about the experiment and why they chose to participate (they were unaware of the observation taking place as we were a distance away while this was happening).