Week 5
This week is the beginning of concepts and ideas taking shape. For next Friday we should have about 3 concepts and some sort of prototypes or physical representations of them.
From all of the insights I have had different ideas drifting through my head but I have found it difficult to capture things and to organise my thoughts because there are so many different directions that I can go and it's been a little difficult to focus on one or another. So right now my plan is to try somehow organise my head and make sense of everything I've gathered up to now.
From last Friday's presentation, I was able to identify different strands and possibilities for a design. I then took the navigation strand and divided that into: orientation - knowing whether I'm walking the right or the wrong way, indoor navigation - this is something that is being looked into but I have yet to find something solid and somewhat working in this area and it is something that will greatly help visually impaired people especially when visiting a new building they've never been in before, and last but not least, obstacles - things that you want to avoid like bins on collection day, bumping into parked cars etc, and things that you need to find like the "stop" button in a bus, pedestrian crossing light, the doorway of a building you're trying to get into.
I did a quick 5 minute brainstorming around each of the strands yesterday to get the ideas started. From the quick idea generation I realised that I found it hard to think of ideas for some strands like indoor navigation, maybe because I don't have that much experience in it or know a lot about it. I also realised that obstacles might be something that I am interested in designing for. At the same time, the 3 strands definitely overlap each other and are related to each other so it is possible that whatever I end up coming up with it might be linked to all 3.
From my chat with the tutors I was advised to start creating scenarios and they might help me visualise things and have something more specific to design for and also help in getting my thoughts together.
I decided to do out 3 different scenarios that involve 3 different journeys.
- Something that is part of an everyday routine that is done a few times a week close to home.
- Something that is done a few times a month, like going into Dublin City Centre.
- A brand new experience visiting a place you've never been to before, something that you're not familiar with.
Next task is to work on these scenarios and hopefully come up with different ideas for each one. I don't know if this way of working will necessarily help me right now but I'll try it out and let you know how I get on.
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