Its unfortunate I couldn't post a day to day report about the workshop itself. After getting here we managed to get back to the residence hotel around 7:00 pm. The two days after that we stayed back working late into the night and therefore I couldn't update this blog on a daily basis. Following is a brief summary of what we did on a day to day basis.
Monday. 17th July 2006
The workshop was kickstarted and all the groups presented their progress and gave a basic overview of their expectations of the Global Membership Workshop (GMW). We were split into groups of mixed teams based on the topic and were assigned rooms that we would be using for the rest of the workshop.
Since the teams were from different countries the language barrier was the biggest barrier. However after momentary discomfort the group started to get comfortable with each other by initiating a simple exercise of creating forms out of paper and sticking them in the room. This also created a very playful atmosphere and set the tone for the rest of the days ahead.
Tuesday. 18th July 2006
We decided to share our processes in greater detail in order to understand clearly the steps that each of the group went through to get to their current stage. Interestingly we realized that not only were the processes different but that each team had slightly varied versions of the brief itself. Although this was a negative aspect and that we felt that the communication with each overseas team should have been distributed equally, we felt that this could have also been the reason why each team had focused on different aspects of the process itself. For eg: Team SDC (China) had focused a lot on translating concept metaphors to product ideas. Team Seoul had concentrated more on the research and trend analysis. In my opinion our strength lied in focusing on the user perspective and creating opportunities from experiences driven scenario building.
Wednesday. 19th July 2006
Morning. We had been looking forward to the tutor feedback since one of our primary expectations from the workshop was to elicit as much feedback as possible from both peers and experts. This would enable us to move ahead in our design process. I personally look forward to critique from various people since it only helps me get a wider perspective about peoples views. As a designer it is important to understand and empathize with people other than yourself because it is them who you are designing for.
Our meeting with the tutor was slightly disappointing as it was not too specific & constructive. However some of the inputs that we definitely will take into consideration are:
+ The needs we had identified were the right ones and that Samsung has identified similar needs, therefore we could go ahead with those
+ Our concepts were too practical and were producable. We were asked to think a little out of the box and visionary even though 2010 was the target year. Contrary to what we had understood, the ideas developed in this project were not going to be produced or would not feed into any product line.
Afternoon. After receiving this feedback from the tutor our group decided to meet and discuss the way forward. Since we hadn't received any feedback on the way forward we decided to take a few steps back in our process, and relook at some of our concepts.
Quite disappointed with the feedback, we decided to organize a constructive critique session for our ideas from Team China & Team Seoul. At the end of the day the critique session went off really well and we really valued the feedback and critique we had got from the two teams in our rooms. We now had a few definitive issues to address in our project.
Thursday. 20th July 2006
Morning: There was a seminar that had been organized for us. Although it was titled 'Introduction to New Technologies', when we finally reached the seminar room we were told that the seminar was on 'User Interfaces for Digital Still Cameras'. Many of us were disappointed, especially the ones from the Creative New Businesses(CNB) group as we were expecting some input into our project by understanding some new technologies such as e-paper, liquid displays, etc. However, the seminar introduced us to a few basics about digital camera UI's.
Afternoon We continued a discussion and brainstorming on a few areas we hadn't concentrated on earlier in our process.
We were also fortunate enought to get a surprise visit from another tutor. After explaining our project from his he shared some of his obervations with us. He suggested the following:
+ Our process until now had been robust from the user perspective and it was great that we had managed to extract the right needs out of it. However, we were asked to take the technology driven approach and combine he findings of this approach with the user driven approach.
+ Since we had followed the scenario based approach we had charted out an entire days experience for one persona. This again had been very helpful in identifying the overarching needs but we were asked to take a deep dive into one activity and explore the potential solution for that one activity. For eg: If
Shopping was an experience we had explored, we now had to explore a specific activity such as
Sarah goes shopping for shoes.
Later in the night we prepared the presentation we had to make on Friday.
Friday 21st July 2006
Presentations
