Louise Skjoldborg Lessél

Exam Hand-In

Exam: mapOUT – an interactive map for planning you day. Process report.

Concept is a product of working with elderly men (60+) in an etnographic study.

Annex: see www.louiselessel.com/mapOUT

Sketching and Prototyping

Today we went back one step and started brainstorming down another path, on my request (or should I say command) we used the initial findings of  “all elder men go for walks” and “Jens sometimes has trouble finding out what to do that day” as our basis for coming up with ideas. Also the excellent concept of “walk and talk” were used as a big inspiration for our brainstorm.

Since I had already brainstormed at home on from those 3 aspects I was deligthed to see that the 2 other members of my group came up with almost the exact same idea. However with additions and moderations.

So we came up with a new idea, one I’m pretty happy about (obviously).

The idea is that we make a map, like a papermap.

On the map you can see what places to go to today, you search based on your interests. Say you are interested in new buildings and architecture, you press the icon with the buiding, and pick which building you want to go see.  You can also see who else is going.

The idea is that you have to walk to the places, so the map displays how far there is from you to there. And the other idea is that you then meet up with other people going the same place a long the way.

We also think our design should be able to take pictures.. Say you want to show this guy you met at the construction site you walked to how it looked earlier in the process. You just show him the pictures.

We used the Houde and Hill text (todays homework) for defining how to create the prototype. I.e using the 3 aspects of a prototype: Role (role it plays in life). Look and Feel (how the artifact feels) and Implementation (which materials), making a couple of sketches for each. Though no prototype yet…

Rapid design ideas

Today we had to take on of the scenarios we drew last time, make a 3D model of it, and solve it in some way.

Due to picking a bad scenario to solve we had a very hard time coming up with ideas that were useful. We ended up coming up with an idea of some interactive, motion-powered 3D glasses, as a solution to the problem that Jens wouldn’t go to a jazz concert because it was at a place he combines with young people.

So we let the concert come to him instead. And having to incorporate getting exersice in some way, our idea was that you had to move in order for the glasses to give you live-feed from the concert. – Not a likely a design elderly would like or use.

Storyboard and Personas

Today we made Personas (a practice where you come of with fictional non-stereotypical characters, to help you get a user-perspective on your design). For more information on Personas, visit www.snitker.com. Lene Nielsen is the danish “guru” on Personas, we had her at the ITU, telling us all about them.

We then made drawings of 3 scenarios which might occur in Jens’ life, based on our interview with him.

Creating something to help us get ideas

Today we learnt some tools to help us draw out the useful things from the interview. There were several tools, but we chose the “problem schedule”.

So we saw the interview again (from the video we took) and identified the problems. You do this:

State quotation from interview, Sum up the problem, The reason, A possible solution, and A possible IT-solution.

Vision and interview sum-up

Today we recapped on our interview with Jens, our informant.

We then bought a book to put everything relating to Jens life in there. We lokked in magazine and cut and pasted everything that reminded of us Jens. We also made drawings of all of the things he liked to do. Especially the exersice related ones.

Based on what we found out about his entire life and how his everyday was now, we wrote a vision for our design. The Vision may be found here. >missing link<

Basically the Vision states that we want to take something familiar and base our design on that, making it easier for elderly people to use, because then they don’t have to learn a new thing from scratch. It also states that we want to make it really easy to use by making an intuitive design, meaning we want people to look at it, and know exactly how to use, by just looking at it.

Making arrangements for our interview

Today we figured out what we got out of our Voxpop with the elderly men. (read more here, – sorry in danish)

We also found an informant for our design process. We have to interview that informant about his life, and make the interview ourselves.

We decided to make it a loosely structured interview because we wanted Jens, our informant, to pour his heart out. Making sure we got all the info we needed, we created an interview-guide (may be found the same place as above – sorry, still in danish).

Elderly men (60+) project startup

Today we did a Voxpop (voice of the people) on three questions regarding our design exam on “Elderly men, moving” meant like both exersice and socially keeping oneself out there.

We went to the mall (Frederiksberg Centret) and asked the men we met.

The one truly common thing we found out is that elder men walk a lot.