Our Final Review will be held at CCA on December 10, 2006 from 1:30pm-4:30pm in the Bruce Galleries (across from the Boardroom). Food and drink will be provided and please invite people to the review!
Lifecycle Photo/Video Permission form
Please use this form if you plan to use any of your interview images as part of your final project that will be on display at CCA or The Thoreau Center for Sustainability. This only applies to private interviews, not images that you took in public places. It is especially important for Barbie and Diaper teams if you are using images of children as you must have permission to use them publically.
Contact the person (or parent) and let them know that you are sending 2 copies of the form and that they need to return one to you signed (or do it in person) as soon as they receive it. Turn in the returned forms to Katherine for CCA’s records.
Filed under: Deliverable
As we discussed in class, you each need to complete a team and self evaluation for Monday, October 9. Please email your completed evaluations to:
cscheffy@ideo.com
Please answer each of the questions below once for yourself, and once for each of your teammates. Spend no more than an hour doing this entire exercise.
1) Your name
2) Your team name and product
3) Your teammates’ names
4) Please comment on your/team member’s contribution to the project. What are your/team member’s strengths? What are your/team member’s weaknesses? (Are they organized? On time to meetings? Follow through on what they say they are going to do? Contribution to the overall body of work?)
5) Please comment on your/team member’s grasp of the concepts and process presented in class. (Does everyone “get it” or are certain parts still very confusing or unclear to some people?)
6) Please feel free to include any other comments you want us to read: particular things you contributed, interpersonal dynamics (good or bad), group dynamics (good or bad), and if you have overcome any issues successfully in your group or areas where your team really needs help.
Filed under: Deliverable
Hi all. After yesterday’s class, we (your instructors) all met and took stock of where you all are. We saw a lot of evidence of searching the Internet and reading books, but very little evidence of the type of user observations we’ve been talking about all semester. It’s past time to get cracking on that part of the project. We know that it’s new territory for nearly all of you, and we know that it’s difficult, so don’t wait to start. We’ve presented you with many of the techniques and skills to do this work, so look back over those notes and put them into practice. We’ve given you all the freedom to work at your own pace and schedule and figure things out a bit, and the results are not there yet. So, here’s some more direction on what your coming two weeks look like and what our expectations are for the upcoming class meetings.
Plan on some real hours in the next 1.5 weeks with your teams. The finish date for your all your research will be Monday, Oct 9. That means that on that date, you will have completed 100% of your research and you each will present concise, compelling visual documentation of the research you all will have conducted, insights you have derived from that research, frameworks that you have developed out of those insights and research, and compelling opportunity areas and directions in which you will start designing during the next phase.
On Monday October 2:
Your research should be 70% done. We will meet with you all on this date to see where you are, but the emphasis will be on a working session, and you should all be well on your way.
For this coming Wednesday (October 4):
You will all be 90% done with your research. Here’s what we expect to see on that date from each team. We know it takes time, that’s why we’re telling you today:
1) You’ll have conducted 4-6 interviews and observations. Plan on at least an hour for each observation, plus the time to get there, the time to discuss it as a team, and the time to prepare questions and any technology (cameras, video, etc.). You needn’t do more than 6 observations, but don’t stop at 4 if you have unanswered questions or users you need to observe! We want to see clear visual evidence of significant:
* Activities that occur with your product.
* Environments where your product can be used, sold, discarded.
* Interactions that are unique to your product or are outside of the typical use of the product.
* Objects that relate to your product or affect the use of your product.
* Users from multiple segment categories – who uses the product, young, old, loves it, hates it, uses it in unlikely ways.
Show us all your important observations. You decide what’s important, but you need to make us believe it and you need to show it. We want to see your:
* Notes – not everything, just what you think is essential to communicate.
* Relevant quotes from people
* And most of all, visual evidence in the form of photos, video (with permission), sketches, etc (see above) – you are all visual communicators, so it’s time to talk less and show more.
2) Show us clusters (significant patterns) of observations. Draw connections with similar or contrasting behaviors, themes, and trends you see in your observations. This process takes time! You will need to meet and tell stories of who you saw and start identifying and pulling out the following:
* patterns of behavior. Many of you have conducted some basic interviews – have you synthesized the patterns? What are common behaviors? How might those commonalities help direct your observations going forward?
* types of people (belief systems, values, perceptions and misperceptions, etc.). You may wish to talk to the PDA group and ask about one of their extreme users – they have identified a person who is running a side business of refurbishing phones in his home and selling them for a profit.
* visualize these patterns whenever appropriate; for example diagrams of process; diagrams of users; types of important behavior. You may all wish to look at the diaper group’s organization of their data – it is a baseline of where you all should have been on Monday, and everyone can certainly go further with that type of a map.
3) Describe opportunities for the design of new products, systems, services, environments within the domain you’re researching. These opportunities should be broad enough that they aren’t dependent on one specific design skillset — not “what can I design?” but instead, “what would be a cool problem to solve?”
4) Some concepts for how you will present your research on the following Monday, October 9. You will each have about 15 minutes to present, and some time for questions and critique on October 9. You need to develop your visual presentation as well as your verbal presentation for that date. Each member of your team needs to present a part of your work on that date – no team should have just one spokesperson.
The time between Wednesday October 4 and Monday October 9 should be spent filling any holes in your research (we’ll help you identify those holes in class by working with the teams on Wednesday) and crafting beautiful visual presentations of your work for the Monday October 9 presentations.
Filed under: Deliverable
The statement of intent is a formal document, but it is not written in stone. Your team will have the opportunity to change/ adjust it several times during the project, basically after each end-of-phase presentation. At each end-of-phase presentation you will pull out the statement and compare your prediction to the work presented.
Use the statement to do some initial thinking about your object to get a gut feeling for the opportunity areas and your team’s area of interest. It is also important to look at the skillset of your team to be realistic about the kind of final deliverable you can achieve. Do some planing about what you intend to achieve in each phase, what you will do to get to the results, and how you want to communciate them to your audience. What should become clearer over the course of the project are limitations, factors that were not forseeable and design decisions that your team consciously made.
