Prototyping and testing
- Irene (Shiyin Zheng)
- Jun 8, 2019
- 3 min read
With the shared kitchen idea, we changed the question into "exchanging the experience of cooking", while the exchange happened when two or more people are cooking together. We asked ourselves the question "what can we do for two or more strangers cooking together?" From there, we narrowed down our idea this week and did some further research.
Brainstorming
For us, the "shared kitchen" idea is still broad. It has too many stages and we first thought about the "gift" in our idea. We had to define what the gift is but we found it hard to design something thing for it.
We brainstormed about the question "what can we do for two or more strangers cooking together?" We thought about different kinds of events or games to build up trust among strangers before cooking, and I thought more towards exhibitions, like showing sensory journey of cooking.
We also went to a food exhibition to get some inspiration in V&A museum. It gave us some inspirations about pop-up events. From the exhibition, we concluded that the value of food existed in four categories, political value, cultural value, social value and environmental value. The exhibition was more about environmental value like turning waste into valuable things, while social value is more interrelated with our idea.
After these, we found that we were more interested in the design opportunities of before-cooking stage, so we decided to focus more on that stage.
Mapping out the ideas
We first mapped out the ideas in the before-cooking stage. We used the method of writing ideas on post-its individually before discussing and categorising together. It worked quite well because ideas were displayed clearly and we could focus on the same sheet.
We decided to limit the scenario inside the university (UAL) first because it is easier to build trust among students and we can actually test the idea out. We brainstormed both online and offline activities and the "drifting bottle" under the random got most votes. Inspired by that, we wanted to create a random choosing cooking partners journey as well.
We also discussed about the details of the random choosing idea (on the left) and the cooking process (on the right). We looked at recipes, ingredients, cooking, washing and eating. Around finding ingredients maybe from the students (things in good condition but they have excess of) to choosing recipes they really want to try. About eating it can be like a feast.
Test
To know how people respond and write messages for finding cooking partners from the university and also understand their expectations, we built a model to test.
Objectives:
What kind of messages they would write?
What kind of messages they would prefer to reply?
What are their expectations for the system?
The model was designed as a random way to choose messages from students of UAL and also for writing messages. We used the metaphor of the ocean and drifting bottles. Ivy and I went to the 3D workshop to laser cut and glue the Acrylic box.
We prepared some of the messages ourselves and structured the questions from "What is your favourite part of cooking with people?" to "If you would use such a system, and what are the expectations and concerns?".
We interviewed 11 people and translated the recordings into scripts. We concluded the information that’s important for the messages, which are gender, course and motivation/goals/expectations/skills for cooking. We added that into our system and figured out the rules for the first time user but we did not go into every detail:
Messages format: gender & course & motivation/goals/expectations/skills for cooking
After replying, cannot read new messages but wait for up to 24 hours
The conversation expires in 24 hours, after 24 hours, get chances to read again
Filters: locations, type of food, number of people
After reading 5 messages, suggest to write a message.
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