Seminar 2 - Rickard Bergeling

Chapter 6 – Brainstorming and Ideation

This chapter was about a stage of the project that I feel we are well passed at this point. It’s about brainstorming and how to come up with ideas. Since we have already concluded the fact that our current idea is the one we are going to stick to, it feels a bit excessive to further analyze the different methods of brainstorming and ideation. What could be relevant, though, is to analyze our design process and how it has related to the contents of this chapter.

“Brainstorming requires some tools. First, because of the limitations of today’s available technology, brainstorming should never be done digitally; it should be done with paper, pencils, pens, markers, and possibly whiteboards and sticky notes. You need to be able to jot down an idea quickly, set it aside, and move on to the next idea. Fumbling with technology just gets in the way.”

This is something that I feel has worked very well for us, even though many of the members in our group frequently brings laptops and tablets to school, we have kept brainstorming using as little technology as possible. Something that also went well was the fact that we have a great tolerance in the group for different ideas and perspectives.

Something that I think could be improved for the next group project when it comes to the brainstorming-phase is that we shouldn’t spend too much time on a single idea. In our group, we really wanted to evolve the idea as much as possible as soon as we saw even the slightest potential. I think it could be better to move on and come up with as many ideas as possible and then go back to get the best features from each idea.

Chapter 7 - Refinement

When it comes to this chapter, what I found most interesting was Direct/Indirect Manipulation and The Magic Number Seven-rule. Since we have not started on our interactive prototype-development yet, we have only stated in words how we want the interaction to be. We have said that we want an ageless design that is intuitive to use. Therefore I think that we will benefit the most from using Direct Manipulation as our main concept when forming the interactive tools. Also, this chapter state that you should not deviate from the standard unless your design significantly improves the program. I therefore believe that we should design using the guidelines of application-making for tablets and try to deviate as little as possible. Our products “personality” will come in place with the choices of fonts, colors and so on. Not by using a weird layout.

The Magic Number Seven-rule states that a person’s short-term memory can only hold 7 (plus-minus 2) pieces of information at a given time. If given too much information the person will naturally forget some of it. I think this is something we can use when deciding how much information the visitor should be exposed to before our product indicates that he/she is able to answer questions about the exhibition. 

Chapter 8 – Prototyping, testing and development

Since we do not stand to actually develop our product, my discussion about this chapter will be limited to prototyping and testing. This is something that I am really excited about, although I am not sure of how we are going to make the prototype since none of us have experience in application-programming.

A quote from this chapter that really stuck was: “Eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak”, stating that we do not want excessive options or such that will plotter the application and make it hard to use. We have stated previously that we want an ageless and simplistic design, which I think will aid a lot in eliminating unnecessary elements.

So far we have not yet discussed whether or not our product should use sound as a tool for feedback to the user. My instinct tells me that we should limit our use of sound as much as possible since we have clearly stated that we don’t want our screens to take focus from the exhibition itself, and using sound-queues might be distracting to the other visitors.

Questions for the seminar:

How do we best visualize the interaction with a product without being able to code it? Are you allowed to use video?

In our case (explain project if necessary) will we need to actually make an RFID-wristband or does a simple 3d-model suffice?