5/4/2017 0 Comments Week 8 - Project expo!We're kind of really attached to this project and this group and we honestly can't believe the final day is here. Despite the last minute hustle that was us setting up our lovely little corner space in 310 Jacobs, we're honestly really proud of everything that we've accomplished. Our experience at expo as a team was somewhat hectic, but there was never a moment when we weren't supportive of each other. Whether it was helping explain our process, showcasing our shy poster campaign, or navigating our app's prototype on our phone, we truly did function with a lot of support for each other. Throughout the past eight weeks, we've navigated through the innovation cycle, through framing and reframing, through diverging and converging, and whatever else design process fell in between. There were times when we simply did not know the direction in which we were headed-- it's honestly harder than you think to devote a tech + design project dedicated to such a nuanced human condition, a condition that's essentially different yet the same for each individual.
Throughout our process we've iterated our "How Might We" more times than we can count. From encouraging un-sharing to normalizing shyness to making common sense of solitude to integrating introvertedness in music sharing applications-- it's honestly a feat. At the end, we've reached our massive, yet significantly important HMW of lowering the barrier of social interactions and increasing the possibility for serendipitous relationships for shy individuals. Our display of colorful posters attracted a lot of visitors to our booth. It was a genuinely fun experience to explain our intentions behind our design and our app. Most visitors and judges received our ideas pretty well and in return we were asked some very important questions, should we continue on with the project after the class.
0 Comments
4/27/2017 0 Comments Week 7 - Making Things!We had our ideas down, we knew what we wanted to do, so the next step was to bring them to life. We all split responsibilities and then we started making things. Sebastian handled the mockups of the User Interface, making sure to make something intuitive and easy to navigate for our users. Shota, Kate, Sharon and Peggy all made several posters for our visual campaign. Shota laser cut some keychains that were meant to represent our wearable bluetooth device. At this point we hadn't finished everything, the UI was still only medium fidelity, we had two keychains total and none of the posters had been printed, but we were on our way to having lots of good material for our showcase.
On Thursday, we all gathered up together and created a slide deck for Shrinking Violets. In class we gave a presentation about our process, in which we discussed how we came to our current how might we question and how we had decided to do what we were currently doing. In this presentation we showed a few of the things that we had done, but wanted to mainly save them for the Jacobs showcase. Here is our presentation. 4/20/2017 0 Comments Week 5 and 6- Bringing It To LifeDuring these two weeks, we started concept generation. Since we decided to go with a bluetooth keychain that connects to an app, we began to come up with ways to bring our project to life. First, we began to define our stories- what inspired us to make this product. We also created our user experience and imagined the process that a shy individual would encounter while using our product. In addition to the keychain and the app, we also decided that we wanted to market for the product. We came up with the idea of designing posters, since we are all very visually-inclined people. We thought the posters would be a good way to advertise for our product while also promoting the idea that the human condition of shyness is something that should be cherished. From there, we started to work on the actual application. We created the user story and notification journey, and thought out the flow of our UI. We struggled the most during these two weeks trying to define our story. We were worried that building an application would take away from our initial "How Might We.." question of easing social interactions for shy people. However, we realized that by personalizing the application to tailor fit the dispositions of shy individuals as well as creating posters to de-stigmatize shyness, we were able to combine technology and socially engaged art to create our own unique story.
In week 4, each of us brought many creative ideas based on our question "How might we normalize shyness through un-sharing". Some ideas built on physical things, for example, a cafe which aims at encouraging people to communicate with each other; while others focused on technology, such as a bluetooth keychain or an App. All of those ideas are brilliant and unique, however, in order to determine our final project, we decided to use dots to vote our favourite idea. Therefore, we got Top 5 ideas.
At first, we tried to combine those selected ideas together, but after a deep discussion, we concluded that develop a single idea completely may be a better choice. Through the inspiration by "Tile", we finally determined to design a keychain-connected App to help shy people build social interaction. In this way, the original prototype was born. For our 3rd week of innovative collaboration, we conducted individual interviews. These interviews were from people that we personally knew and we asked them about their experiences with shyness in general. The following is a script and template of our interview: Warm-Up Hi, I’m currently working on a project to help shy individuals overcome socially anxious situations & form greater connections. Building Rapport So maybe the best place to start is have you introduce yourself and tell us a little about who you are & your sentiments on your own shyness or general thoughts on the subject? Tour Can you walk me through a situation where you have felt shy? - On average how often do you encounter these situations? - Could you explain the reason for your shyness? Could you walk us through your thoughts in a specific experience? How do you think shyness affects your interactions with others? - What would you change? - What wouldn’t you change? How do you feel shyness affects how others feel about you? (reverse of last question) Ideally, how could a situation in which you are overcome by shyness be eased for you? Can you tell me about a time you overcame shyness? - How did you go about doing that? Reflection Just to clarify …. (clarifying points regarding some answers) Wrap-up Is there anything else you’d like to talk about or add? Thank you! The result of our interviews are elaborated on here. Essentially, we found shyness to be a completely natural and innate human condition. This revelation kind of made our project ideation a little intimidating because it's quite challenging to tackle such a nuanced concept. We don't necessarily see shyness as some "wicked problem" to solve, but instead we see it as a trait to be normalized and even built upon. The majority of our interviews revealed shyness to be something that is formed out of intimidation, fear of embarrassment, culture and language barriers, and anxiety about first impressions. During week 2, we bonded as a team. We all went out for yogurt at the local yogurt parlor Menchies. Afterwards we walked down to North Gate and sat in the grass, while we answered some questions to get to each other better. We then took some cute photos together and parted ways. Getting to know each other like this really helped to improve our team dynamic. Now that we knew each other better we could collaborate even more. The second half of the week we did context research, which is were we looked up how the world perceives shyness. Some key things that we learned are that shyness is normal and that it isn't the same thing as introversion. Introverts are people who prefer to stray away from social interactions that make them uncomfortable, while shyness is just the fear of looking bad in a social situation, thus straying away from it. There was a cool Ted Talk video by Susan Cain, called the Power of Introverts. During our research, we also stumbled upon the phrase "shrinking violets," which is an old idiom referring to shy individuals. Doesn't it just have the cutest ring to it? 3/9/2017 0 Comments Week 1 - You plus worldIn week 1, formed our team.
|
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |