Week 4.1 - Revisit the Garden
- Irene (Shiyin Zheng)
- Mar 4, 2019
- 3 min read
Updated: Mar 14, 2019
Time: 2019.2.25-2019.3.3
Group: Cheuk Him Tam (Jordy) & Irene (me)
Idea generation
Before revisiting the Chelsea Physic Garden, we discussed again about the initial idea and the goal of revisit as well.
At first, we got some ideas about water. Jordy thought we could build a new river inside the garden and there could be a floating guider on the river as a navigation. I found the idea quite imaginative but hard to achieve. We agreed that this project was still a practical one and we abandoned the idea of river.
We also thought about balloons in each area so that visitors can see the instruction from a distance. But again, making balloons was still unrealistic for the garden, and it should be interactive instead of showing information.
Then all of a sudden, we were inspired by paper pressing and agreed that this can be used on introducing plant's life cycle to the visitors and this is a simple way of interaction as well.
We developed the idea by asking ourselves the following questions:
How would visitors get paper?
What is the use of the paper after pressing?
How can visitor follow up the life cycle?
Can the paper be souvenir as well?
Based on the questions, we then developed our idea and made it more detailed. We made a storyboard of the initial idea and prepared to test it out during the visit. We changed the paper into cards , so that visitor can bring something back and make use of them. We thought about redesigning the stands so that visitors can do the press on each of the information standings.
Interview questions
We also prepared questions for interview.
1 background
age
how often(times) do you visit the garden
why
2 about the garden
what is your favourite part in the garden? Why?
what is your least favourite part in the garden? Why?
3 medical area
Do you know about medical area?
Any plants you are interested?
Test of the storyboard
Revisit the garden
We had some new findings for this visit. Visiting the garden one week after, things had changed a lot.
Interviews
We interviewed four groups of people in the medical plant area, varied from family, students, experts to plant lovers. Some visitors even came from another country to visit the garden because it has rare plants where other gardens do not have. What surprised us was that people told us they felt the information there in the medical area was quite enough for them. The text was okay and even if they want to know more, they can search online. This was because people who visited the medical area were mainly plant lovers and experts, and they were willing to read long texts. However, these people were not our target users. We aimed to get people who were not interested in the medical plants more involved with the area.
We also got one suggestion. An interviewee told us that we could think about helping people to search online if they felt interested in one plant. A large group of visitors are the elderly, and they do not know how to search for specific information. We then had an idea of highlighting some keywords on the information stands.
Current audio guide
Luckily, this time we tried the current audio guide out and found we can also add extra audio about the plants to the medical area. Currently there was only a general introduction around 2 mins for the whole area.
Idea test
We also tested the storyboards out and found that they quite liked the idea. One person asked about what if it rained, and another person asked us to carry it out before testing again. This encouraged us a lot.
Plants information
After we got enough information, we thought about choosing the example plants to make the standings and the bookmarks. We picked plants according to whether they were flowering currently and took pictures of them.
We then distributed the work and each of us was in charge of three plants' information, including life cycle, flowering period and drawings, as the preparation for our following bookmarks. We made a table to conclude the research information.
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