RemindMe
Participatory Design Study 2006
RemindMe is a personal memory-aid. It was conceptualized through a 13-week process focused on learning and putting into use, methods of participatory design. My team of 3 distributed cultural probes, held participatory design workshops, and created personas, journey frameworks, video informances, and video scenarios, before resulting in a defined product prototype/concept. The ultimate goal of the project was to create "a product for the home".
final scenario
This final scenario shows how the product "remindMe" might be used during an average day at home. For more information on the form, function, process, and general concept, please keep scrollin' down!
cultural probes
After the first week of deciding on a target audience, my two teammates left the course, so I joined another team who also lost a teammate. They had already defined their group as recent immigrants from mainland China, between the ages of 25 and 35, and were working on ideas for a cultural probe. We worked together to come up with possible items that would inspire participants, while not requiring much of their time or resources. We were aware that this segment of the population was generally quite busy, and would not likely have much time to devote to a cultural probe.
We then found 5 participants matching our target group, and conducted interviews with them, during which we gave them the cultural probe, explained what it was, and arranged a time to pick it up again. Between a week and a week and a half later, we retrieved what probes were completed (2 of the 5), and extracted information. Posters were designed and printed to present in class, and to receive feedback from the professor and the 6 other students. My teammate James designed these posters.
personas
To get the most out of the interviews and cultural probes, we created personas. We tried to give these personas as detailed characteristics as we could come up with, in order to make them feel as real as possible. James designed the persona posters, and I designed the comparison poster, using his style.
journey frameworks
Following the IDEO method of creating journey frameworks, we proposed the following 2 frameworks based on informance 1 (forgetting something at home) and informance 3 (not having enough hands for groceries) above. The content is very tall in these images, so please click to view in full and get a better idea of what these are about. Please note the purple framework describes both a situation with, and without a potential solution in place. My teammates created the green framework, and I created the purple one.
For some background, a journey framework is a graphical illustration of a scenario. it depicts the major steps in the experience, and displays questions that would be asked by all agents affected, thereby providing the designer with a very detailed map of us. This allows the designer to alter the solution based on the journey a user takes, while at the same time bringing the designer ever closer to the scale of the individual user.
workshops
At this point we held 2 participatory design workshops over a period of 2 weeks, including some of the participants from the interviews and cultural probes, as well as participants new to the project. The workshops, following techniques put forth by Liz Sanders, gave us a way to further refine our design direction based on creative feedback through role-playing, image collage, idea-mapping, and other say-do-make activities.
We conducted the workshops in Mandarin, so as to provide a higher level of comfort for the participants (Although I couldn't speak the language, the act of observing and taking notes allowed me to understand much of what was going on, which was confirmed with my [somewhat astonished] teammates after each workshop).
design scenarios
After further defining our design direction we created two scenario videos based on a similar situation: A homeowner is cooking a meal that requires significant time. Rather than spend all that time at home watching the meal to ensure nothing is overcooked, she uses our reminder device. Upon exiting the threshold of the front door, an alarm will sound, prompting the user "to remember something" like a string on a finger. It then allows the user to set a timer before it goes off again. This device can be paired with others, as shown in scenario 2, when the husband returns home.
final report
At the end of the course, we were required to compile a final report of everything we had accomplished throughout the duration of the project. I wrote and proofread the majority of text, and created and organized the structure and layout, following the simple yet informative formats of required reading documents we were given during the course. The report is 14 pages, and I've barely covered anything on this page, so please click here or below to read about the project in more detail!
