Research

You may remember that Artefact and Carbon have been collaborating on a project with the Western Washington University Industrial Design Juniors.

As part of this project, the students broke into groups and went out in the field to observe, interview, and study students and teachers in the classroom environment. The ID Juniors eagerly took on the task, going beyond the project requirements and performing additional intercept studies, interviews with professors of pedagogy, and more. We provided guidance on some of our processes for extracting key insights from all that observation and information.

Envision

Back in Bellingham we hosted an Artefact-style collaborative brainstorm session (except that we were stuck in a boring beige room…) to take those key insights and turn them into design opportunities & concepts. This was a great opportunity to work side-by-side with the students and help them generate many fun concepts for future educational tools and products.

It was an interesting mix of existing and new skills. It was great to work with students who aren’t afraid to sketch – something that comes in handy during a brainstorm - and be able to focus on getting them to think critically about user needs and problems and then creatively imagine valuable solutions. One fun concept included a multi-user, multi-touch surface computing desk where students work together collaborative on a project and compete with other student groups in a game-like setting.

Anders Mavis describes capturing kids’ vitals at school for improving health and education…

Evan McCormack ponders about how a device like the restaurant buzzer could be used to keep parents involved with their kids…

Tucker Spofford imagines a wall of photo frames for interactively sharing student work…

Let ‘em loose…

After the session, the students were armed and ready to rinse-and-repeat the process and continue to refine their concepts. The groups then met up again with the students and teachers and conducted basic concept value testing to understand and rank the value of their ideas. Some examples are shown below.