Urbbi has a voice! Although a slightly generic boring voice for now but I’m working on his pronunciation!
As described in my earlier weeknotes Urbbi is currently reading the light levels and moisture in the workshop at CIID. I think the light being so erratic is due to the crazy building going on from the class of CIID 2011 in the workshop at the moment! Or some kind of calibration issue, I’ll look into that later.
For now heres, the light levels.
And the data for Moisture.
Update on the weeks work in the workshop. I got Urbbi winking a little hello. I guess he need’s another eye before he looks like a pirate!
An update from the shop floor. I’m heavily back into making the final prototype in preparation for testing over the weekend so this will just be a quick one. Note the action shot!
Here’s a short video I shot and edited in a day to describe the vision behind my design direction currently.
Apologies for both the overly dramatic music and ‘did-it-while-cooking’ AE motion tracking…
Enjoy!
A belated update indeed. Time to catch up!
I was lucky enough to take back another batch of rapid idea prototypes to some of the people around Copenhagen I’ve been researching & co-creating with over past few weeks.
This time my concepts focused a bit more in the, if it’s fair to say, “digital realm”. The decision to tailor my prototypes more towards this was based on two things. Firstly, and unashamedly, I’ve grown an interest in developing a solution for urban gardening exploring it’s relationship with current advances in technology, sensing and social networking. It’s a like a personal inquiry. Can technology and growing something integrate better than they currently do? Secondly, a lot of the feedback I was getting from people using some of the early prototypes were highlighting inconsistencies in the way the product (or service) was conveyed through the form of an idea prototype and the reality of the solution to their everyday lives. something became clear. ‘Smart’ stuff is everywhere now. Including that particular gem, the smartphone.
I decided to incorporate some of these realities in an attempt to suggest ways that ‘smart’ technology can not only be ‘smart’ itself but also let YOU be smart. In essence that is what my project is trying to do, using growing as a context.
Here’s some examples.
For now I won’t go into the exact details of how they work or what they are, suffice to say that to the right we have a service/product to help and inspire people to care for their herbs or plants by providing feedback in a specific tone of voice (I will release a video soon to explain more). To the left we have a ‘seed starter kit’. Simple and similar to many on the market except this one encourages you to keep in contact with your seedling through email. A strange combination I know. Strange enough for user testing? Yes!
“No that’s really odd I would prefer the other one where it shows me on the actual box. I feel attach then. Like it’s my box. And it’s helping me out”
An important point was bought up at this point. People, you and me and everyday folk, develop interest in something progressively and often because of incentive. It’s why it’s so common for people who eat healthy to often find themselves caring for herbs. Some even find themselves trying to sprout their own herbs at this point. But the important point raised is that it’s progressive. Pushing a seed box onto the market without a real grounding in something that encourages, excites and delights people to care for something like a plant in the first place has an obvious outcome.
A main thing I learned again from doing this testing was a dual stroke. People want help in understanding the potential and problems of THEIR environment when it comes to growing and caring for a plant. If they don’t they can’t care. If they can’t care, they lose interest and give up. I think I describe everyone’s experience of buying a potted herb from a supermarket only to find it dead 2 days later.
“And I give it sun, and water but nothing. It died. I actually kept [the bonsai tree]. Maybe because I still want to know why…”
The weekends’ efforts. I’m definitely focusing in on something more and more as I busy myself in the design phase. It’ s one of my favourite times of a project when working through a problem with your hands and sketching you can really start to tighten up was has been a lot of open ended questions up until now. Most are just experiments and a way for me to think. More coming soon!
What a crazy few weeks!
Partly it’s the reason I’ve had to combine both weeks into one set of notes. Last week I was mainly busy building prototypes for testing and sharing over the weekend so my focus was away from thinking (in the abstract sense anyway) and more on expressing my ideas as something sensory. This is something that I find increasingly important. “Sketch it!” is what my old tutor back at Industrial design degree level used to tell me and I finally see his point. An idea means nothing if you can’t express it either on paper or physically. I jumped the moment I had planned out what I was doing and after two weeks I found myself with ‘articulated’ ideas I felt confident going into user testing with.
I did a couple of activities. Firstly I set up a communal herb garden in my building where I live here in Copenhagen specifically to test my more communal/sharing ideas. After the initial shock of seeing a strange looking English guy sitting in the foyer staring at herbs in a box on the floor I managed to engage many people some of the designs and got some great feedback. In this space the main consensus from people was that they couldn’t understand who was responsible for the herbs and hence, actually didn’t feel enticed. A lack of information at this point may be to blame and it’s true that after explaining my concept many people could see themselves using the ideas but I sensed a real opportunity (and difficulty!) in making the concept about shared living spaces.
My next session was actually in the apartment of a young couple living just outside of the city centre here. I was warmly received and again got some great feedback and observations. The general concept of the delivery service was agreed upon as being a good idea for many reasons that made sense to their lifestyles. (Considering they live above a local supermarket this was amazing to me.) Many factors like the availability of herbs, being able to choose which ones they wanted, not worrying about how to take of them. They really saw the value of the convenience. Some of the ideas however, which explored what kind of added value can be included, were either misunderstood or not seen the value in. One specific prototype, however, really sparked some discussion. The Travelling Recipe book started off as a way to share and get knowledge from the community of people involved in the service and eventually started to draw a lot of parallels with many social networking dynamics. They really dug into the details and even came up with many of their own. This was great. Having a physical mockup there allowed them to add to it, experience it and imagine themselves using it. What I got out of it was focused, creative feedback. A common theme from this session that arose was the potential in all of the ideas to be part of the same service but differentiated as various product offerings for various people and their lifestyles. I had not thought of this at the time of development and in hindsight makes sense since all of the prototypes I presented were based around the delivery box.
Two conflicted things started to be clear to me. First that there was real value in the service side of the concept. Naturally since it was a convenience driven service. People really saw the value in it. But more and more through seeing my prototypes it became a realisation that there needed to be a ‘value added’ in the form of the physical delivery. I explored this in the experience prototyping essentially but not many felt I was there yet. Which, of course, is fine but something else happened…
During my preparations last week I received an email from the family who I had co-created with in France. The email was an update into the box we planted together with an attached image of the first sprouts. In it they asked if we could Skype so I could see it. Talking to them I felt the excitement in the sudden appearance of life in the box which up until then was shrouded in mystery as to whether something would happen or not. I came to a realisation that showing this with me was both a feeling of sharing in success but also in wanting to know what to do now! Questions about watering, dryness of the soil, sunlight came bubbling up, some of which I could answer but others just needed assurance that everything would be ok. Just wait and see. I realised that within my idea of the herb delivery service what I really was speaking about was about channels of communication. Being able to have someone there they knew they could seek help from was just as valuable as providing the box with the seeds and everything in the first place, if not more valuable.
This feeling was subsequently echoed by Timo Arnall from Berg London when we, at CIID, were lucky enough to have both Timo and Jack Schulze come over to spend a few days with us and give us feedback on our project directions. Both the guys were great and really honed in on the essence of our project concepts. Being great storytellers really brought a critical interrogation of exactly how we were going to communicate and present our work. But, I digress. Timo really felt I had strayed in my prototyping efforts by trying to inject ‘value’ into a concept which already had so much value to offer. Helping people care for their plants is such a huge challenge area in itself that trying to ‘add value’ may distract and confuse. Of course he has a point, but it doesn’t detract from the invaluable learnings from the prototyping in which, upon looking back, also reflected this. A clear direction was always there, I just needed someone to get excited about. And Timo did just that.
Currently I’m focusing heavily on three concepts tackling what I speak about. With insight as my driver and technology as a tool I want to explore three facets of caring and nurturing for herbs (or other plants) from seed to healthy adult plant. I am deliberately grounding the concepts in present technology but ‘bending the rules’ slightly to ask some questions about our current interaction with our plant life in our urban households. Why do we need to treat it like we have gardens? Why do we need to put plants in a pot? Why can’t technology encourage and HELP me not only care for the plant but also form a relationship with growing my own? For a long time the idea of technology in the world of gardening has been resisted and where it has grown has been totally independent of the technology we use in our everyday lives ALREADY. Should it be so separate? Should we just be relegating growing something to the greenhouse or the pot or the balcony? Why isn’t growing something as, if not just in a fractional way, similar to that other great period of caring for something. Children. My concepts explore this and I’ll be developing them for testing next week.
As a final word before I head back into the depths of the workshop: I expect many mobile phones to get very dirty in the future. We’ll see!
Next weeknotes incoming end of November. Till then look out for updates from the ‘shop floor!
Thought I’d throw up a quick slideshow of last weeks user testing. I must say it was very useful and I look forward to developing the concept further. More details are coming in the form of my late weeknotes! Look out for that soon.
Never in my life have I had hot glue burns and brown fingers from soil until this project!
An update from the workshop here at CIID. I’m currently putting the finishing touches on the first round of prototypes. I have an experience prototyping session arranged for Saturday morning and so I have decided to postpone my usual weeknotes until Saturday/Sunday evening to make full use of the session. (And have something more to write about other than how hard it is to laser cut Coca-Cola bottle caps… ask me about it sometime!).
So this week has been quite hectic since getting back from Paris. I dived (almost) straight into the prototyping after finishing up the prototyping plan I’d been working on since just before leaving.
A word on the prototypes so that it’s a little bit less of a mystery! I’m developing 6 iterations starting from the core delivery service prototype which is essentially just a box of nice, fresh herbs that I intend to use as a vehicle for ACTUALLY running the service and delivering fresh herbs to a lucky individual. Of course it will need to be kind of sped up since there is only 5 weeks left! I’m planning on spending most of my budget on herbs for this project. Which in a way is exactly how it should be! Seriously though I’m treating this as my foundation from which I have 5 prototypes for potential directions around fostering inspiration and knowledge in growing-your-own. These are roughly (list prototype categories). Slowly, with the last prototype, I’m reaching the edge of the boundaries for this project that I set just after the group brainstorming session. I’ve tried to be as concrete, and simple as possible with these prototypes. Some are as simple as a blank book to inspire people to share recipes and tips about growing something. I really want to use this first session as a way to fail as quickly as possible and catch the phoenixes as they fly from the ashes. In the non-poetic way: Get my users to co-create with me. I had hoped to be finished with the prototypes this week but waiting on parts and other engagements at CIID have inevitably delayed this. Next week I should be busy putting the finishing touches, planting herbs and heading out into the wild.
I’ve been giving the service a lot of thought lately. Zooming in on details and touch-points of the service in pursuit of making it a tighter, focused offering with a clear value proposition. In my mind I’m always questioned the the real value in what I’m doing. It’s natural after this last year at CIID. Recently this week I learnt a simple and trivial yet powerful thing about interaction. People’s ability to remember something through interaction is increased by about 50%. It’s the something in this sentence that has me the most excited. My offering should be clear and concise and my interaction should be rich & memorable. Little touch points like offering people te ability to skip a weeks delivery if they can still get the herbs they want from their box is great. But what if you also give them the ability to instead gift it to a family or friend. The extra mile in these cases becomes all the more meaningful. And yet any real enrichment inevitably adds dimensions of complexity to any service or system. The real question I will end up address, and what most of the decisions I will make up until the day of the exhibition/presentation here at CIID, will be how I can keep this richness along side a simple, solid service proposal. More on this in the future.
Another thing of note this week is around the actual box design. I’ve been playing a lot (as the natural industrial designer that I am) with box designs, new modular systems, materials and shapes…. but a thought occurred to me that maybe the simplest solution would be to modify existing, recycled boxes for the delivery of the herbs. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a different style box every week? You could even give people the opportunity to keep their favourites… or even add their own ones that are just lying around at home into the logistic system. All questions for prototyping, I guess, but again, begs the thought of where to add richness into the service. Could it be as simple as the box itself? I think it’s really time to sit down and blueprint out the entire service and all it’s potential touch points. In parallel, of course, prototyping will inform this and eventually through iterations I can get to the point where I have a solid service blueprint on which to start final production. So that’s the plan I feel this week and next. Time to get back into it. I think my glue has dried now!
Catch up next week!