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.
Liam Sheppard 