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Design Brief and User Research
For our Creativity in Design project we were given the brief ‘How can we use smart city and other digital technologies to enhance the design of space between buildings?’ and utilized creativity and design techniques in order to achieve this. After understanding smart city technologies, we brainstormed problems that we identified in spaces between buildings. From this, we found common themes and separated our problems into certain categories such as ‘social’ and ‘environmental.’
We decided to visit a space between buildings in order to help generate some ideas. After visiting St James Church Park and conducting an unstructured interview with some visitors we decided on the park as our space.Another visit to Spa Fields helped us to decide on that specific park as our chosen space.
From this trek, which was an ‘Imagery Trek,’ we identified problems in the park and a possible target audience. We issued a more specific interview to the people eating lunch in the park and gathered some important information. We chose recycling as the problem, and lunchtime professional who eat lunch in the park as our target audience. Our team aimed to create a digital recycling bin that would tackle problems such as overfilled bins, incorrect recycling and lack of engagement with the green spaces in the city.
Feature brainstorm
We also utilized tools such as constraint removal and creativity triggers in order to generate ideas and design features. As we began to create conceptual designs, we also developed storyboards for both the existing user journey (below) and possible future user journeys.
Conceptual Design
We found a lot of inspiration from online research, other smart city technologies and spontaneously from everyday life – such as the Waitrose coin collection, which inspired out voting for a sustainable feature in our recycling bin.
Our conceptual design process was iterative, we evaluated each others designs and built upon the ones we believed to be effective and successful. A final brainstorming session allowed us to choose a design to build on.
We allocated work between each group member but made sure that everyone had the opportunity to input design decisions. Once we had finalized our design, we had a concrete future user journey to illustrate how our bin could be used.
