Assumptions, Affinity, and Alignment - IoT Project Kick Off
Super excited about our project topic for my understanding users class. We have been tasked with designing a new product or service for the home that leverages the internet of things and ubiquitous computing. In classic Art Center fashion we dove right in to identify potential problem spaces and opportunities for further research.
Working with a new group always presents new opportunities to develop and lay a collaborative foundation. A tool I uncovered in Berlin that helped build internal consensus and help the team align was an affinity diagramming exercise.
Busting out the post its and taking ten minutes to have everyone record their preliminary assumptions on what opportunities exist at the intersection of the internet of things and the automated home let our team hit the ground running.
After thirty minutes of throwing our post its on the wall we walked away with a feeling that we could all collaborate together and everyone’s voice was heard.
It’s easy to feel intimidated when working with new people and the Affinity Diagramming exercise was a great way to launch everyone into being creative together because the act of generating multiple ideas removes the pressure of making sure the first idea you share is amazing. Another benefit of Affinity Diagramming is that everyone is encouraged to interact with each post it grouping like ideas together whether they generated the original idea or not.
Lastly, the categorization and naming of Affinity Diagramming breaks the ice when it comes to talking about the ideas and reveals the teams assumptions about this topic of study.
At the end of the session we all took one category for further research, which includes looking into the following:
Problems & Objectives of the product / service
Competitors
Business Goals / Revenue Models
Users & Audiences
These categories balance the objective of mapping user needs to business goals, which are intended to guide us through design decisions along the continuum of Macro to Micro.
I selected looking at the opportunity space of Self Care in the home and we began looking at potential framework scaffolding that could help frame some of our research along the following axes:
Control <--> Monitor
Passive <--> Active
Expression <--> Utility
I’ve been super inspired by some of the work Lisa Woods has done, most recently by her course work at CCA on UX Frameworks. Check it out for a delightful visual representation of experience specific frameworks here.
