Week 2: Understanding the context of use > 2a Introduction to week 2 > Introduction to week 2
- Last week, we introduced the basics of designing.
- You learned how to unravel product meaning using their WHAT, HOW and WHY structure.
- By identifying whether or not a product has a valid reason of existence in relation to somebody’s morning ritual, you can identify the urgency to design something new, more meaningful for people.
- The first week was all about unraveling your own morning ritual and forming an opinion about it.
- As you know by now, designers should design products for others, not for themselves.
- You will study another person’s morning ritual using the methods and tools provided.
- From your fieldwork, you will formulate key insights that will drive your design process later on.
Week 2: Understanding the context of use > 2b Lecture: Understanding the context of use > Understanding the context of use
- Hi. Designers are informed by what the market asks for, what technology can offer and, increasingly, by the insights in the lives and experiences of the intended users: the context of use.
- When you design for somebody else, you want it to fit into their everyday lives, into their experience, that context of use.
- Looking at the context can give you unexpected insights into what your design should do.
- You will know how you have your coffee in the morning and how you experience the ritual, but how do other people have coffee? Do they even have coffee? Just a cup, on a table, shows you only a little bit of context.
- A broader look tells you where, and how it’s used.
- If you broaden the view a bit more, you see it is part of the breakfast table, and you notice the drinker of coffee is not alone.
- It involves space and time, people and feelings, activities and concerns.
- The question is: how far should you go as a designer to include more insights? How big is the context? What plays a part in their experiences, in their motivations? Is it about what happens at the table? About how people have breakfast? About how they prepare their family for the day? Somewhere you have to draw a boundary, and that boundary depends on what you want to design.
- It helps to choose two boundaries, the focus – what you are designing for- and the scope – a bigger picture that is connected to that.
- If you focus on designing something that should improve the experience of having coffee at home, the scope could be having breakfast.
- Your design challenge determines how to set the focus and scope.
- If you are designing for a better coffee experience, you might be concerned most with what happens at the breakfast table.
- If you are designing ‘something that helps a busy family to plan their day’ you could focus on the people involved, and what they do the rest of the day.
- If not from the design challenge, then it will be determined by your project budget.
- It involves what people do, why they do it, how they feel about it, what is meaningful for them, who else is involved, and practical things like when and where it happens.
- What sources do you have to build that understanding of the context and experiences of other people? You have your own experiences, and you already made a mindmap to chart these.
- Because you are designing for others, you should expect that they do things different from you.
- Type ‘drinking coffee’ on Google, or browse some magazines and you get plenty of information.
- It’s not just having a glance or asking them to solve your design problem.
- If you are designing for somebody else, you need to understand their situation and experiences.
- Going in, observing and talking to such other people is an essential step in discovering what makes them tick, and to see in what situation your design should fit.
Week 2: Understanding the context of use > 2c Lecture: Tools for understanding the context of use > Tools for understanding the context of use
- One of those tools is the timeline tool and the other tool is the social circle tool to see who else is involved in the morning ritual.
- The timeline tool consist of three steps and it goes from factual to experiences and feelings.
- Than they can select one good and one bad activity and explain way they think that is a good or a bad experience.
- Probably a person is not alone during their morning ritual and other people might also influence that experience.
- There are many tools that can help you let people express their feelings, but the basics are always the same: you go from facts to letting them express their feelings and experiences.
Week 2: Understanding the context of use > 2d Reflecting on your work > Benchmark video week 2 Koen & Iris
- To understand the context of others, it’s important to step into that context.
- So with him in mind, we started a mindmap about his assumed morning ritual.
- Our own morning ritual served as inspiration to come up with assumptions.
- After finishing the interview guide, we made an appointment and met up with our participant.
- Hi. Be sure to bring some material, so your participant can visualize his story in the best way.
- While the participant fills in the time line and social map, make sure to use the guide to remind yourself of the things you want to know more about.
- After filling in the social map, the participant showed us places in his house to illustrate his stories.
- This poster will serve as inspiration in later stages of the design process.
- I agree, well let’s see how an expert implements this method in practice.
Week 2: Understanding the context of use > 2d Reflecting on your work > Benchmark video design expert
- We prepare participants by means of sensitizing assignments, which are actually just like the assignments that you did with your participant last week And after the sensitizing period, which is about a week, we bring more than one participants together in a session and during a session we can add a few more collage making assignments for example.
- When you bring participants together in a session you enable them to take more time to share their experiences and they will share even richer stories because they can also react on eachothers’ experiences Muzus collaborates with companies, by conducting design research mostly by means of context mapping research and after this design research phase we help our clients to innovate based on user needs.
Week 2: Understanding the context of use > * Sofa session – Reflection on week 1: Understanding meaning in design > Sofa session week 2
- First I would like to reflect on what is a morning ritual.
- Some of you were wonder, if each morning is different, we can speak about a ritual.
- I would define a ritual as course of events that support specific values.
- For example a wedding ritual is a course of events that supports specific social values.
- A morning ritual could involve certain values about, for example, how we deal with time or hygiene or responsibilities.
- So a morning ritual could also support some specific values and therefor has a specific meaning for people.
- Maybe interesting to think about, what these values could be in a morning ritual.
- In this course you can use the term ritual as you like.
- It is enough to ask yourself why we experienced this course of event, which we call here our morning ritual.
- What I like about this example is that it is very well, nice drawings, and that it is a clear I think a student live.
- This is also a lot of you found the same kind of differences of weekdays and weekends that the ritual has something to do with time and that there is a lot of repetition and that you don’t want to think about things.
- The problem that it is not relaxed and yeah this is expressed like serious, careful and elaborate and the weekend is more about freedom, flexible and haphazard.
- It’s about how do you interact with your morning ritual.
- It’s in this case: under control during the weekdays and it’s like the relationship with a teacher, where it is in the weekends an open relationship and it is, and that is I think a nice expression, a relationship with someone who I flirted with.
- I think this is the most serious question, and the most difficult to answer and she or he, the student did a very good try to translate the experience, which was during the weekdays restrainable.
- For the development it sais: “Has to wake up in the morning” and I would says that it is maybe more a personal development, maybe, but what we mean with the development is that there is something happening in society or in a situation that is over a longer time.
- On that level you could think about developments and then for trends, its like here: “Dress well to be attractive to other people”.
- That a trend that maybe some fashion is maybe really important nowadays and you have to do a lot in the morning to dress up according to this expectations.
- The trend is to polish your nails and that takes a lot of time and that makes you feel restraint.
- This project is from Valentina Sierra and I selected this as an example also to show you the nice visualisation of her morning ritual.
- What I also what is interesting is that she mentioned all kinds of emotions she had, but also concerns about her weekly morning ritual.
- She mentions also that some mornings there is no water, so I have to wait for some hours to take a shower.
- I can image that it is very annoying and that also just practical problems will come up when you analyse your morning ritual.
- It’s not only because of the duties of other people that you have problems with your morning ritual, but also other factors.
- She also says: “Ok a morning ritual has a meaning, and the person is conscious about it”, which is also a nice observation.
- For the WHY I think it feels frustrated during the week, and I think there are nice observations like: “I am frustrated, because people should have a balanced diet and exercise.
- I think she mentions norms, how it should be, and she cannot cope, not meet the norms, and that why she is also worried.
- It has a lot of information, when I go to understanding the why my morning ritual is like the way it is.
- “Children behave so much and sometimes it’s awful, but sometimes you love them” And what I like about it is that she is in a situation in a family and then she of course you have other interactions.
- Maybe for the next assignment it is interesting to explore from the point of view from the children, how do they experience their morning ritual.
- What are their concerns and how do they think about why it is like that.
- I think that is all for now, and lets see, if you have questions, please post them on the discussion forum.
- OK no I’ve seen these examples, some of you might wonder, why we spend much time on understanding the context; the people and everything that is related to a morning ritual.
- It’s all about someone else’s morning ritual.
Week 2: Understanding the context of use