Starting this project I had mainly set goals within the areas of Creativity & Aesthetics and Technology & Realization. However over the course of the project I made important and unexpected growth in User & Society and Design Research Processes too, changing perspective on my overall competence as experience designer.

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To align with my vision, of experience designer, most important for me was to gain the skills for designing interactive systems through technology prototyping. This, to create experiences in my prototypes and final designs to validate through the user’s interaction. I learned to program all interactive and experiential functions of the Talki Talkie prototype using a variety of programming languages and communication tools as Processing, Arduino, websockets, serial communication and libraries (sound, websockets, serial communication). Most valuable was that I learned how to approach and plan technology prototyping of a design. With the help of experienced students I learned to first find the programming languages, sensors and communication tools needed for all interactive functions of the prototype; later on divide what needs to be programmed into blocks of code and electronic circuiting e.g. its notifying breathing light in different colors, pick up using IR sensor, speech recognition, sound playback and serial communication to finally combine into the final program and circuit to test iteratively. Furthermore, this process improved my problem solving mindset and flexibility, dealing with unexpected break downs in program, circuit wiring and sensors which in the end gave me lots of satisfaction. Doing this for 2.5 weeks made me enthusiastic to take these learnings with me to a higher level in my upcoming master projects. 

 

Next to the technological learnings, I learned to use some tools for aesthetical interaction design by thinking through design dynamics (e.g. multi-user game rules in the first co-creation concepts), interaction and experience moodboards, design scenario diagrams and expert discussions.

 

Because of my experience within user research I had not expected to learn this much within User & Society. I have learned to organize, prepare, set-up and lead different types of validations than done before with as main difference dealing with insights collection from multiple stakeholders at the same time, having different backgrounds and values; such as in the co-reflection workshop with caretaker and a chef. Leading these validations improved my presentation skills, learning to convey project purpose, workshop purpose, what is expected and helping solve misunderstandings and guide discussions. Furthermore, I got the insight in using a variety of interesting tools during interviews and observations to validate design directions in a more exploratory way, other than design sketches, verbal explanations or one mid-term prototype. For example, the resident experiment regarding “choosing from real food” using real food choices learned me to gather valuable insights fast and in a simple way. The same holds for the video validation session in iteration 5. 

 

Regarding Design Research Processes, I have learned to apply a service design approach in the project. From previous projects I had experience involving multi-stakeholders but often translated their insights to iterate on the (interaction) design itself. From this project I learned to get in touch with unexpected stakeholders doing multi-stakeholder interviews (food company visit, speech therapist interview) and learned to design from their evidence an overall service in a service blueprint, in which the design functions as tangible touch point for most important stakeholders (user, caretakers, food company).