Exploring and Choosing topics

Last week, we focused on exchanging of experiences. Since the topics are still too broad, we stuck a lot while narrowing down. We explored different topics and used physical models to help us get back to the way before moving on again.

Difficulties in continuing the former idea

We first continued to explore the idea of friends exchanging experiences, but we ended up wondering why they would need a third actor to exchange experiences. We agreed that friends may not be our addressing group. Then we started with tribes - groups having same interests. We again found it hard to design something "new", because there are already tons of organisations doing this. We did not want to simply develop something inside existing organisations either, even though the trust is already there.

We also thought about the exchange among strangers, but we found it hard to start. We could not picture a specific scenario and we were stuck with specifying the "experience". We have to scale down to a more detailed topic first to get ourselves out.

Brainstorming scenarios as ideas

An exploration of the topic

We went back to our research and analysed the characteristics of the experiences described by people. We first explored health related experience as a topic, because we found that people value health and most of people are willing to exchange things for health. We questioned if they understand the trade-off of exchanging their data for the experiences. This seemed like a good non-financial transaction to focus on exchanging data for an experience.

To getting people understood, we built a physical model. The model was more towards the look and feel side representing the areas we were interested in.

We used the metaphor of an exploded gift box: activities were outsides but exchange happened underneath. We explored different experiences around health such as food, medical reports, hereditary diseases as well as physical activities.

We also looked into healthy technologies. Although people are buying these technologies - their experiences are framed by the personal data they share with it - so in order to understand them better we researched how some of them work.

The physical model for exploring "health" topic

The physical model

Process of making the model

From there, we also explored food as a big topic, because food related experiences contain the most rich stories in our primary research, and cooking in particular. The value exchange generates naturally when a group of people are cooking together and exchanging their experiences.

We are all interested in this direction, so we continued with it for exploring design opportunities and related it back to the primary research.

We presented our idea at Made by Many

Reflection

We were struggling this week. The main reason was that our brief was too abstract and we did not frame the brief quickly. We started our research in experience exchanging but we did not specify the type of the experience. Therefore, our research only led us to the varied categorises of experience, which made our direction become vague and broad again. We struggled in finding directions.

Another thing is that after we chose experience as our direction in the former week, we paid more attention to "exchange" rather than "value". Therefore, when we decided on one direction and started to think about value, we felt difficult to connect it with value, and we would easily be stuck again. I found that It is often the case, especially for a group, that we tend to forget about some key points in the brief during the long design journey; We need to remind ourselves from time to time to keep on the road.

But finally, we agreed on choosing cooking as our main topic and continued our journey.