Mini-Charrette Review and Reflection

Last week I took part in a Mini-Charrette for KIB100 – Design and Creative Thinking. This task involved getting briefed on what problem we were solving, being randomly divided into groups, and then designing, researching, sketching, and presenting our ideas as a group. We were required to design an interactive system that would be used in a garden located at a Queensland hospital. The idea of the garden was put forward by the indigenous community, who said that they wanted a garden with native Australian plants and information on them about things such as a plant’s name, medical use, culinary use, aroma, etc. They would also like the hospital guests to be able to access the garden, as many indigenous Australians view hospitals as a “place to die”.

I was put into a group with four girls, we decided to go down to the Botanical Gardens and create our plan for the project. This was a good decision, as we gained a lot of inspiration from the gardens. We were seated near an archway, so we decided to incorporate archways into our final design. These archways would play audio which would explain a plant in the garden when someone walked through them. We also decided to add a sensor to the arch so that it would only play the audio if it sensed a chip. We did this because we wanted to give people the ability to opt out of hearing the audio if they just want to go to the garden to relax instead of to learn. I think that the use of audio was a great idea because blind people and people that are in hospital beds or wheelchairs will not be able to easily read information from signage, and will find it much easier to simply relax and listen. At first, I thought this idea was overly simple and not particularly creative, but after presenting and hearing feedback, I realized that we had in fact thought of a good solution which did exactly what was asked of it. We were encouraged to take risks in our design, and personally, I believe that we could have taken bigger risks as this was a perfect opportunity to do so.

The people that I worked with were easy to communicate and plan with. We all split our workload in a fair way and we all contributed a good amount of ideas. We organized our allocated time very wisely into planning, researching and designing, but we rushed the video that we used to present ideas. We also did not find the time to create a powerpoint to assist us in presenting our concept. I believe that a powerpoint would have shown our ideas in a much more professional and engaging way.

Before presenting ideas, three of my group members had to leave because the Seminar went overtime. This left me and one other group member to present ideas. I believe that both of us presented professionally, although we could have planned the presentation a bit more, and could have used more professional language.

I believe that this was an important task to undergo before our official Charrette. I got to experience working with people I had never met before, in a situation where our time was very limited. I have learned how to better manage my time and will hopefully find time to prepare a more professional presentation when I am undergoing the official Charrette.

Annotated Bibliography for Project 2 (Walk Again)

Here’s my annotated bibliography:

In project 2 we are focusing on designing something that will assist disabled people with their daily lives in order to become more independent.  Because someone in my group has had experience with temporary Lower Body Incapacitation, we decided to focus on this particular disability, and come up with a way to assist people with broken legs or other lower body injuries.

“Orthosports” (2009). ACL Reconstruction. Retrieved April 10, 2013, from http://www.orthosports.com.au/content_common/pg-acl-reconstruction.seo
This web page explains the process behind reconstructing a torn anterior cruciate ligament, which is just one of the many parts of the leg that can be damaged, showing what happens during the operation, and also rehabilitation following the operation. This gives us an idea of already existing methods that are used to heal this ligament. There is also a video which demonstrates some of the process. This will help our design as we will now understand how the damage is healed and other treatments, giving us something to emulate or assist with our device.

“Sydney Orthopedic Specialists” (2013). Knees. Retrieved April 10, 2013, from http://www.sydneyorthopaedic.com.au/knees.html
This web page lists multiple different knee injuries and how they can each be healed, as well as possible risks, all available treatments, etc. They also have a large amount of videos that all show the processes that can be undertaken to fix many different injuries. This just expands on the previous reference, giving us even more of an idea of knee damage and fixes which will help with designing our solution.

Shiel, W. C. (n.d.). Broken Leg. Retrieved April 10, 2013, from http://www.emedicinehealth.com/broken_leg/article_em.htm
This is an article with multiple pages, providing a huge amount of information on broken legs, their treatment, prevention, self-care, etc. This article also strengthens our understanding of these injuries and how they can be treated. It also has a “self-care at home” page which shows us what people with broken legs need to be aware of at home, and perhaps our device could assist them with this.

Kennett, P. (2013). Tips for Home Survival. Retrieved April 10, 2013, from http://www.mybrokenleg.com/tips.html
This site gives tips to those with broken legs on how they can deal with their broken legs in their home. It talks about food, sanitation, clothing, communication, and more. Our device could possibly use some of these tips in order to make the device more worthwhile and beneficial for the patient, assisting them in more ways than one.

Hydroacive Ltd. (2010). What is Hydrotherapy. Retrieved April 10, 2013, from http://www.hydroactive.net/what-is-hydrotherapy.htm
This website explains what Hydrotherapy is, how it works, and what benefits it provides. We have decided that our device will emulate hydrotherapy in some way so that people can be treated in the same way, but at any time of day, while doing any activity, such as walking to the shops, cooking food, etc.

Rehabcorp Physiotherapy. (n.d.) Benefits of Hydrotherapy. Retrieved April 10, 2013, from http://www.rehabcorp.com.au/hydrotherapy/benefits-of-hydrotherapy.html
Like the last link, this site goes in depth into what benefits hydrotherapy provides and why people should consider treatment with it.

Project 1 Review and Reflection

Hi again!
Last week, we were looking at a brief given to us by our tutor. This brief outlined the fact that not many young people save for the future, and even less save for retirement. We were tasked with coming up with potential solutions for this issue that will encourage young people to save money (and learn about it too!). Me, along with my group members, James and Pete, came up with a few solutions. Firstly, we proposed an idea in which people could save with a social network, and compare savings or compete for prizes. Another idea was to make an advertising campaign which depicted a person’s life being better if they save money for the future, because “a dollar tomorrow is worth more than a dollar today!”

Anyway, before coming up with prototypes with any potential, we first had to research our demographic. Our demographic for this task was, of course, young people in their late teens to mid-late twenties, and we all know where people that age congregate! Facebook! So my group members and I wrote a survey and distributed it via Facebook. Our feedback was mostly unsurprising, although we were quite confused when we found that not a single person wanted to share their financial information via social networking. We quickly figured out that this was due to people not wanting to brag about money or not wanting to see that someone else has more money than them. People, of course, wanted to win prizes for saving, which is a complete no-brainer, people will do anything if it means they could win something, right?

We also asked people about their main form of entertainment. Most people answered that they watched TV, surfed the internet, watched movies, and watched Youtube videos. This of course shows us the best places to advertise our new product, this could eventually be even more specific, by researching the content of each media outlet that people in our demographic will watch the most, and then targeting our advertising at the right time (Meaning that we probably won’t do a good job at advertising to young adults during Antiques Roadshow).

To finish off our investigation, we asked people how much money they thought they would need to support their lifestyle after retiring. The numbers varied a huge amount, from $100, 000 all the way to $5, 000 000, which is a huge difference, so of course we would need to include accurate figures in our advertising, in order to teach people how much money they need, because it’s a pretty important detail.

I think our method of surveying was done well when we only had a few days to get answers, and only our combined friends lists on Facebook to answer our questions, but it is not a 100% accurate depiction of our demographic’s opinions, because we need to think about who would have taken the survey. What we definitely know is that people who took the survey are a very small sample of people in this demographic, all are Facebook users, and all are friends with one of me or my group members. We also know that many people would have seen “Survey” and thought “Nope. Not doing a survey,” effectively giving us a small sample of people who were either really bored or just wanted to help us out. In my opinion, the best way to survey a huge group of people for this would be to distribute it over many different media outlets, and perhaps throw in an incentive to encourage more people into actually partaking.

I think as a first exercise, this worked well, we learned more about our demographic, and we crossed off a possible idea due to the survey, which changed our direction to one which would have eventually lead to a much better solution in the end. We now know that people do not want to compare savings, as sharing that information can make people feel spoilt, guilty, or even embarrassed, which is not a good way to encourage sharing saving progress socially.