This was the first week of the Research phase of the project, on this stage we will work on understanding our user, his behaviour and his needs.
After the Design Research workshop with Charlie Mulholland we started working on our design brief; in this document we define the main problem we’re working on, our main goals, the main stakeholders of the project, some research findings and a detailed requirement list. We will use this document as an input on the concept phase. Next month this is going be used by Charlie on his next workshop.
Oriented by Marco van Hout we began to create our Research Questions, they will guide us through the next phases and will give us more focus on our research. The main question so far is “How can we design an educational interactive concept for kids to enhance their news literacy?”.
Marco also gave a User Research workshop which gave us good ideas of how to approach our main problem and how to understand the people involved in it. We learned some new techniques like bodystorming and each group presented their ideas to everyone. Each of us played a roll in our concept: Kuba represented the user that creates the news, Jay was the medium that received and shared the content and I symbolised the user that received the news and could give some kind of feedback.
On this workshop we presented our research questions and got great insights from Marco and the other teams. This is a video made by our friend Shin of us presenting our ideas:
Now the Research Phase has officially started! We are very excited about everything we’ll discover in the next weeks!
The second week of our journey started with a realy nice Makey Makey workshop by Loes. We learned how to create realy different interfaces and ways to use our body as a way to control devices.
We also did a design research workshop by Charlie Mulholland wich gave us insight in stakeholders and ways to get a clear problem definition. Good stuff!
Next up was a short visit to Little Chicken Game Company, http://www.littlechicken.nl/. We had the chance to see them test a game with children from 6 to 10 years old. The game was made for Cinekid and we also got to meet our assigners there. They set up a special room to test a movie-making game with the kids. We sat in the other room and could follow the testing trough 2 webcams. Very interesting to see how kids respond to new games. They gave very honest answers and had a good opinion about certain aspects of the game.
The day after the meeting at Little Chicken we met up with Cinekid Office at Leidseplein. We had some good insight about he goals and projects of Cinekid. Specially the Cinekid Festival. Watch this video to have an impression of what Cinekid Festival is: Video Cinekid Festival 2012
Friday we visited the Science Centre Nemo with the other team of Games 4 Health and did some observations en research ( and yes, we also had some good old fun time with bubbles and electricity ). All in the name of science and research!
This will be our first blog post of our internship at the MediaLAB Amsterdam which officially started on the 4th of September 2013. It has been in interesting week where we were able to meet our fellow students, teammates and coaches.
The week started off with an introduction day. This included a tour around the University, introduction of the coaches and some very exciting Pecha Kucha presentations. In these presentation students were able to present themselves within a very short period of time. After the presentation our team was lucky enough the talk to our assigner. Here we received more information about our project. Our assigner also brought an interesting concept which she made 10 years ago.
The next day we analyzed and brainstormed about the concept that the assigner gave us. As the concept was very old it needed some improvements. Out of the excitement we already thought about adding game mechanics and improving the environment. Additionally we also brainstormed about the possible technology we could use. After telling this to our coach he told us that there are still a lot of step we need
to take before we are ready to think about the possible technology.
We decided it might be a good plan to come up with a good team name and logo. We settled with the teamname TriVision. Since we all are officially from different countries we implemented three flags on our logo.
On the last day of the week we were given the assignment to create a User Scene. Analyze our user, his environment and his problem. We brainstormed about the given assignment and decided to visualize this on a poster.
