On Friday everyone presented the development of their concept up to date. For me, it was a crazy 3 weeks of preparing for the Something in the Air exhibition and squeezing in some MP work in the last few days before the Friday presentation. I eventually got everything done and presented a good deck.

I went through the insights driving my project to give a background to why I'm designing what I'm designing.

It can be quite difficult to make people understand that this is.. That you can’t park a car up on the pavement. Environmental changes and obstacles are sometimes difficult to avoid.. It’s not just for the visually impaired, to make sure that the area is safe. Accessibility should be universal.

And then I took everyone through what I have been doing up to date (the user testing, researching, decision making) and also the things that I am planning to do next.

For the presentation I did very lo-fi wireframes of the 2 versions of the apps for the visually impaired user and the mapping user and that is one thing I need to keep working on.

The drafts of our design rationales are due in a few days and that will have to take priority. Once that is submitted, these are the things that I will have to work on:

• wireframes of the apps to turn into a clickable prototype for the exhibition
• language of the navigation
• a promo video
• creating the physical experience of using the app at the exhibition

Persona

Since yesterday I made up a quick persona, Jane, which might help me focus my design to this specific demographic.

It can be quite difficult to make people understand that this is.. That you can’t park a car up on the pavement. Environmental changes and obstacles are sometimes difficult to avoid.. It’s not just for the visually impaired, to make sure that the area is safe. Accessibility should be universal.

 Jane is a 24 year old who has just been accepted into a local college. She uses the GPS on her phone to help her navigate around. She uses her laptop on a daily basis for college work.

 Jane doesn't feel very comfortable being out on her own, especially in new places. She finds it difficult to avoid temporary obstacles like cars parked up too close or up on curbs and she generally doesn't spend a lot of time exploring the city centre. Jane prefers to run her errands and not stick around.

One of Jane's goals is to become more independent and not rely on her parents to come out with her a lot of the time. Jane loves art and being creative and would love to enjoy the local culture and attend galleries and different exhibitions more often. She wants to feel more comfortable navigating around the city on her own.

System Features

Week 9

Week 8

This week has been really hectic, mostly because we are preparing for an exhibition of our previous project about air quality, Joining the Data, where we partnered with the EPA and Intel. So our MP's have been put to the side and the Exhibition is taking control. I have tried to squeeze in a little bit of my own MP work because there is still a lot of work to be done.

Week 7

Since Friday's presentation I've been unpacking the feedback that I got and trying to make sense of everything including what my next steps are.


I've decided to go with the Citimap idea - citizen mapping and relaying the information back to visually impaired users. The way I presented it on Friday was that citizens, businesses and councils are able to map permanent and temporary obstacles around the city on a map that everyone is able to access and view including the users themselves, other citizens, tourists etc. On Friday the mapping was done outside but now I am wondering what it would be like if it was done inside, like a shopping centre or a train station etc. Right now these are the questions that I have.

• Am I designing inside or outside?
• What space am I concentrating on?
• What am I trying to achieve/ map?
• How is this done?
• Who can I team up with?

The past few days I have been busy, busy, busy. After my tutorial on Tuesday I went straight into thinking out 3 concepts and deciding what those are. After that I went straight into preparing them on A2 sheets for the presentation on Friday.


A little bit about the concepts I went with.

CITIMAP

INTERACT

Week 6

A little update on my use of scenarios to design for specific situations. I noticed that because my scenarios go through a full journey of a person planning their trip, using some mode of transport or GPS and then having to find the location by foot, it opens me up to designing different interactions like waiting on a bus or knowing which bus is the right one, which stop to get off, while my initial research was mostly based on finding ways to detect obstacles and/ or to avoid obstacles. By going back to the scenarios I've found that my head has been back and forth between several completely different ideas and journeys and it's been making it really hard for me to be able to concentrate and start developing just one (never mind 3 for next Friday). So I think the solution to this is to create a new scenario which is specific to what I want to design for.


I attempted to simplify things for myself in order to clear up my head and started to create a new board where I can put up some clear ideas, to keep them all together, and to have some principles and guidelines for whatever it is I will design. One of the questions that I have is am I designing a product that sees things or is this at a much bigger city scale and is the eyes for my users? Am I detecting obstacles and avoiding them or looking for things and knowing what they are?

After spending a few hours trying to come up with some ideas and researching things already out there, it felt like I was getting nowhere. Everyone who was in studio that day decided to do a quick brainstorming session for everyones projects. It felt like everyone started to hit a wall for some reason.

There was 6 of us in so we got 5 minutes for each project and posted up any ideas that we had. This just gave us something different to do, rested our minds and allowed us to help each other and get ideas from other people. Half an hour later and we had this.

For now I am going back to the drawing board and sketching out all the ideas that I have to put them down on paper and maybe start developing some. I've seemed to hit a wall or else its the activities that I'm doing that aren't suitable to my project that aren't helping me get too far at them moment. Either way, I'm hoping to come across something that will be my eureka moment..