concept, community & webdesign

overview

Type:

Extracurricular

challenge:

Explore the role of communties within a student team.

Role:

Presentation for T-mobile, concept selection method, community design

competencies:

Explanation

Student team BlueJay is building a domestic drone. I know Industrial Designer Martijn who was in the team and he got interested in my expertise in community design. Together we explore the potential of a community for student teams, who can be compared with students teams. We presented this idea to T-Mobile who could become the main sponsor of the project. In the end, I created a Web Design for a new website, which Martijn programmed. Together we worked mostly on the concept of BlueJay, since the team didn’t know what their end result should be. A drone that could fly indoors is quite cool, but what are the benefits? Therefore we looked at over 40 concept for the end presentation and used a grading method to determine the best one.

Reflection

Key learning points: Not everyone understands a design process

The main insight from working with BlueJay, was that students from other faculties do not understand a design process. Martijn and I wrapped our heads around what should be the best direction to go towards. The team was struggling a lot with determining what their end presentation will be and thus what the Drone should be able to do. After a lot of consideration, we came up with the concept. Children that have a long-term illness and thus stay in the hospital for multiple months can’t get home. A start-up created a VR set which allowed them to be in their own house again real-time with a 360 cam. Using the drone, the child could move the camera freely indoors, since now the camera was static. The concept was presented to the team and at first they were enthusiastic. However after a week, they started to doubt, since many questions weren’t answered. Martijn and I were surprised, since we knew this was normal for a design process. The team therefore, chose to go back to no concept, since they were uncomfortable with a specific direction. I was so surprised that the team didn’t understand that we would answer these questions along the way. Martijn had to leave the team, so afterwards I did aswell without accomplishing our goals of creating community software for student teams. Looking back at what we did with the concept selection, can be simular to the impact crowdsourcing can have on the design process. Also when crowdsourcing a idea, you have to determine the criteria of what you consider a quality concept and thus grade all the contributions.

Deliverables