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Time Flies – JP

Team

Commissioner:

Description

Half Way, and Full of Insights

During the first airport research we discovered that waiting at Fukuoka Airport can be a somewhat boring experience for kids. This results from the fact that there are no particular distractions or initiatives at the airport aimed at making their time more enjoyable. Based on this insight we have decided to focus on making the waiting more enjoyable for families with children, in other words: the family is our current target user and to symbolize this group we created a persona, the Suzuki Family.

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Persona: Suzuki Family

To get out in the field as quickly as possible we transferred an earlier idea of the “Monster Aquarium” into a paper and a digital prototype. Even though this solution might seem a bit shallow on first sight (kids putting different monster body parts together to create their own monster) it helped us gaining insights in the way kids play, and it gave us an entrance to talk to parents about their experiences and pain points concerning waiting with kids.

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A second important milestone for the project would have been our translate session with Kuboyama-San, an entrepreneur, and designer of interactive toys. His product facilitated an open ended form of play in which kids and parents could work together to build houses, costumes and more, using the brightly colored panels. But more importantly: his philosophy concerning open ended play has definitely broadened our horizons on what the possibilities are in designing for kids.

Translate_Session

To create some order in all the insights and information we organized a session to extract some new design questions, based on the research done. You can see these main insights below. What we’ll be doing next is widening our view a bit again, and start going back into ideation. With the research in mind the solutions that will come out of ideation will be deeper and more relevant for the airport waiting experience of parents with kids.

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The first sprint

Hello everybody!

It’s been a month now since we first arrive here in Fukuoka and it’s safe to say that we have started to settle down a bit. Don’t get me wrong, we still get surprised every day by the many strange and delightful things this country has to offer (even getting coffee from a vending machines is fun and strange), but with the start of our project we have gotten more a daily routine and things are beginning to feel a bit more familiar.

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The goal for our first sprint (the first three weeks of the project) was to create a simple first prototype for in the waiting room of Fukuoka Airport. To do this we decided to start with some research on the design of waiting rooms and waiting lines. After a few days of searching we found some useful information and insights about what makes a waiting experience more fun or meaningful and less boring or frustrating. For example, fun fact! an airport in Houston managed to solve all the complains from people waiting for their luggage by placing the luggage receival carousel all the way on the other side of the airport. It turns out that people rather spend more time walking from point A to B, than stand around doing nothing.

With all these insights we decided it was time for our first brainstorming session. Now, when you put a few people with different cultural backgrounds together (all speaking their second or third language) you’re bound to get a lot of miscommunication. To solve this we decided to do the brainstorming a little differently, by drawing and sketching all our ideas instead of verbally communicating them. This turned out to be a great way to explain our ideas to each other, and we ended up with three concepts for our first prototype. So our next step was choosing one, and making it!

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However we didn’t realise that we had forgotten a very important part of design, we hadn’t done any research on the people we were designing for. It is very important that you know who you are designing for and what his or her wishes and complaints are. Especially when you’re designing for people in another country. So we decided to put our first prototype on hold, and to focus on some user research.

To get information about our user we decided to go to Fukuoka Airport to do some short interviews with the travelers whom were waiting there for their flight. We interviewed a lot of different people about their waiting experience at the airport, what they liked about it and what could be better. From the results of these interviews we created three different personas or archetypes. We discovered that especially families with children had some problems while they waited, because there is not a lot to do for them at the airport. Most distractions and entertainment (like the souvenir shops and restaurants) are aimed at adults, and so the children quickly get bored. This we found very interesting and we’re looking forward to exploring this further and seeing if we can design something specifically aimed at kids and families.

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So that was our first sprint in a nutshell, sadly we didn’t make a first prototype, but we gathered a lot of interesting and useful information. Now we are ready to start creating a prototype in our next sprint and we can’t wait. In the meantime we will keep exploring the many sights in Japan, from beautiful temples to crazy karaoke rooms. See you next time!

 

Machimasu

Starting our journey to Japan we got a good chance to immerse ourselves in our design problem: waiting at airports. Our flight took about 19 hours, and we killed time by reading, listening to music and aimlessly staring into the TL-lit waiting area’s.

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The other travelers were doing what most people do in any waiting situation, they grab their phones or other internet connected media, and nobody seems particularly happy or frustrated in doing so. What was happening in these waiting rooms was more or less a continuation of what modern people do when they are bored: they tap their screens, and occasionally smile at a passing cat video.

Are these moments of screen tapping truly meaningful? We started asking ourselves when arrived in Japan. If we interact with our smartphones around 150 times per day, then how many of these interactions are truly satisfying? What makes a moment meaningful anyway? The user scene video, centers around these questions. And at the same time it hinds towards an aspect of Japanese culture: striving for an harmonious society. A cultural factor that can be relevant to designing for Fukuoka Airport.

Other than making observations about waiting we have been enjoying the many weird and wonderful sides of Japan. from pointing randomly at menu’s and finding ourselves eating raw chicken, to toilets that play harmonious music. But above all: we have been very lucky with the wonderful people welcoming us, and showing us the way.

To sum up:

1. We’ve got some interesting insights into waiting

2. Japan is great

3. We now know what it feels like to be analphabetic

Love Willem, and Alex

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