Studio and Workshop

Our proposal report was due this week, so we spent a lot of our team time and free time working on it. However, we also spent some time during the studio session on Miro board, and had some discussion about how to access users for interviews and observation during the current lockdown situation. Our task in class was to find a way to observe passengers on a train from where we were sitting, and then discover some other ways we could observe passengers remotely using different techniques and technologies.

Then we moved on to team boards, and spent some time mapping out our theme, domain, user group(s), and so on, in relation to our concepts. As my team has decided to all design separate concepts for the same user group, we only focused on mapping out the parts that applied to the whole team.

I found both these exercises quite helpful, especially in terms of getting ideas for how to do user research under the current restrictions. It was also nice to get a more concrete layout of the design space and user group we needed to focus on.

The workshop was focused on a basic introduction to Arduinos. I have used an Arduino before, but that was nearly 2 years ago, and I'd forgotten most of it. Thankfully, once I started going through some of the activities, it all came back pretty quickly, and I'm feeling a lot more confident that I'll be able to take on any part of my concept that may end up using one.

Report and Individual Concept

As mentioned before, our report was due this week, and we spent a fair bit of time as a team figuring out which aspects were part of our team section, and which parts we needed to write about individually. We decided that a lot of the general background research we had done, as well as our user group and context of use, were similar across all our concepts, so that became part of our team section. We then put all other aspects relating to our individual concepts in the individual sections.

As I had finally decided on my concept at the end of last week, I spent some time this week trying to visualise it, and create a preliminary design sketch to be included in the report.

I don't entirely know how exactly I will achieve all of the functions I want, but after the Arduino workshop on Thursday I feel a lot more confident about the electronic aspects I might need to tackle, and I also trust the experience of the tutors to be able to answer any questions I might have.