Week 10: Design development | Peer reflection, thinking by doing, testing and refining design
Weekly learning objectives
By the end of this week you should be able to:
- Communicate with peers, staff, research groups and industry professionals to clearly define the visual direction of your chosen project brief.
- Collaborate with key stakeholders to gather feedback and ensure that your project aligns with your target audience.
- Make prototypes and user test your design developments, to ensure your project direction is clear, concise and aligns with your target audience.
- Design the direction of your project concept, utilising feedback from your prototyping and user testing results.
Lecture introduction
For the 10th lecture we continue to present our creative practitioner interview series, offering insight into identifying, developing, project managing and completing an industry focused project.
This week the creative practitioners answer the following:
– Please identity and explain a development process / activity where you had to evolve a more revolutionary approach to solve a project.
FELD
VW have their own research studio – all the bright minds in one place. Not just cars but interfaces, experiences, etc., thinking on autonomous driving and technology advances.
FELD were asked if they had ‘an idea’ on autonomous driving and technology advances, that was the brief…
Nobody at FELD was interested in cars, which made working for VW ‘even more fun’. How will autonomous driving change things is still too big a question for anyone to answer. Their thoughts were from the other side: what would the car be thinking? Think of the ordinary items to do with driving; licences… everyone knows how to deal with the common items.
Think of how much machines could know about you? It knows everything. So keeping this scenario, FELD looked at how we might communicate with a machine or a car, a machine we would need to trust. Changing their perspective from designers to everyday users, everyone would have something to say about driverless cars.
“No brief, ‘just something’…”
They avoided anything massively technological for their project, looking into the details of autonomous driving sounds very boring, instead they looked at how people could communicate with a machine. Is the trust based on the machine knowing everything about you or would it be based on the communication with that machine?
Staged work environments in the Artificial Intelligence domain where people could go and talk to the AI and train it to be less machine and more empathic with people. People were encouraged to download an app and communicate with the AI to gain insights on how people interact with machines. It was all a set up, they were communicating the with people instead. FELD controlled the fake AI so they could get ‘it’ to answer the people in certain ways, ‘bitchy’, or very slow to respond, for instance.
The project had no given outcome, it was just to do and see what came out of it. The outcome was that the experience gained about interaction, although not intended to be serious as such, is useful for answering briefs in AI in the future.
It’s a good example of going at a project from a different angle to get surprising results.
Accept & Proceed
Custodians of Canary Wharf.
New buildings, railways, shops, etc., Not currently seen as somewhere to live. Residential buildings were being planned so how could they start to familiarise people with the thought of living in a ‘business area’.
Finding the line for the campaign was hard, what was the main thing? Nobody could agree, so A&P Brough together everything written about Canary Wharf over the last 30 years, input then into a computer and made an algorithm which separated the language, took out the verbs and the nouns, and made three-word statements or commands from them. 1420 headlines/phrases were created, everything for the promotion had it’s own headline. Really bold, really strong statements all created by the algorithm.
A grid was designed to keep the layouts in-check but the texts were all written by the machines… Without the human element to control the language, purely random texts were used, unedited.
Wouter
Redesigned the ID for an orchestra based in Amsterdam, been a client for 15 years so it was hard to detach so they could look at things from a new mindset.
Being an orchestra means sound. A program was created to interact with the sound, type form or colour could be introduced to interact with the sound and create natural shapes and motion. Online, etc., showed the animations but for print the shapes where taken from the screen and used to illustrate the sound on paper.
Edenspiekerman
Clients need help to improve at every step of the way, especially in digital development projects. The scope for a digital project can be massive, it can go on for years, potentially, and if you’re in the middle of the project you’re restricted to the amount you can do within a strict timeframe.
To avoid just showing the progress made to the current point on the timeline of the project, something which can still serve whilst working on the smaller interim elements needs to be on the ‘horizon’, something to show where the project was going.
Reflection & Opinion
I love the way technology creates the content for these projects. There’s no escape from what it says, you just control how it’s said – how it looks. In terms of A&P, it removed the grey area of indecision and for Dumbar it created a visual sound for the orchestra to connect with extra senses. Love it.
To just be in control of the outcome of a project in terms of how it needs to look and not what it says directly gives a sense of freedom to some extent, you don’t care what it’s saying, there’s no need for comprehension, you can just take in what’s there and enjoy.
Couldn’t really understand Eden, there seemed to be a void in the explanation… I couldn’t catch what the two processes were which he spoke about bringing together – it didn’t make sense to me.
Week 10: Resources
Read | Watch | Listen
New source for added info.
Working through and checking more sources I’ve found another reference site: PFOA
80% of police officers suffer from depression or anxiety
Week 10: Workshop Challenge
The Challenge
- Design your selected project concept and engage with key stakeholders to prototype and user test your developments.
- Collaborate with key stakeholders to gather feedback; evaluate this feedback to ensure your project is in line with the original brief, strategy and target audience.
- Make prototypes and user test your design developments.
Initial Visuals
Starter visuals for the intro and first interaction screen, getting the overall look of the app underway.
Responses to questions raised the online crit, Thursday 28th (right).
Collaboration with ‘Mind’, etc.
Ideally, if fully developed the app would include contact points to the PAM Assist organisation already used by the West Mercia Police. Any AI questions and responses, such as shown on the Mind Plan Survey in Week 9, would have to be checked for suitability. Obviously I’m not the one to give advice on mental health issues, but for the project at this stage I’ll be adding ‘dummy’ questions so the project makes sense.
Input the types of jobs attended.
At the moment, I’m intending to include a text field where users can add any comments to work as reminders to what happened during the shift they’re adding to. This could perhaps be covered by a drop-down list, an application of AI which learns how officers word their descriptions of incidents and grows a tailored list to choose from, or simply a predictive text mode like a standard text message. Whichever method needs to be able to be added quickly, the need to write a long response might put users off, based on the research so far.
Wider mood-scale.
Considering a slider approach to the mood input. Left to right = red to green, negative to positive. Visually, Oppo will grow a larger smile as the user slides to the right of the screen.
I think we need to avoid a set of numbers for the user to assess their own mood: choices of 1 – 10, more thinking time might be needed to choose a number slowing down the process, eg: “am I feeling ok: 5, not so ok: is that a 3 or a four?, a bit off: that’s around a 3, not good at all: a 2?, or is one really bad? I might not be feeling as bad as a number 1…”, etc. -vs- “not feeling good, feeling fine, feeling really good”.
A slider might cause uncertainty also, the slider would need solid thresholds, maybe simply split into 3rds to take data in the same way as the three button options.
Gender element.
If Oppo always talks in 1st person it will remove any gender issue. If Oppo is referred to in 3rd person, in instructions, etc., then using the name instead of ‘him’ or ‘her’ would work here.
Privacy issues.
Not sure what these would be, same levels as a banking app?
Other.
I need to look into AI/algorithms to understand enough to consider its uses.
Question for subjects: Slider or straightforward 123 button for mood.
Add comment for the day using keypad or stylus – device dependent?
Avoid repetition
Check login procedure on bank apps.
Show a day-to-day tally of inputs. Highlight the ‘average feeling’ for the week/month.
How can the ‘End Shift’ button work? Don’t want a reminder to keep sounding, maybe if the user hasn’t closed their shift then the next time they come on they’re prompted to say if they finished on time Y/N, if it’s No then have an input field to say what time they did finish.
These extra hours show as a running total with a suggestion of taking time out when you can: ‘you’ve worked an extra ‘X’ hours this week, be sure to take some time out to de-stress before your next shift’, etc.
Would using sounds for some elements slowly start to become annoying? The sounds might also make others aware that you’re in the app, users might prefer not to draw the attention.
Reflection and developments
Good, useful feedback from the Ideas Wall this week. Things I hadn’t considered which were pretty straightforward to fix but would have been those little ‘niggles’ you find after a project launch.
Pleased with my progress on the project – enjoying it – this week’s lecture were timed perfectly as I needed to look into information on AI for the chatbot support section of the app.
