Our second sprint, off course, requires a new sprint goal. While discussing this at first, we were already talking about different media we could start developing. The idea to make an interactive map or website about the life cycle, maybe seemed like a good way to present our findings, but the downside to this is that the development might take up a large part of our time. Precious time that we’d much rather use for doing research. With some user research we might be able to define a few problems concerning (in)sustainable behavior of the smartphone user. So our main focus for this sprint will still be towards research, and as a goal we formulated the following: “Uncover three or more frictions/problems related to the behavior of smartphone, that make the cycle of the smartphone less sustainable.”
A different way to incentivize people to recycle their device
Before being able to really start thinking in solutions, we need a clear defined problem to solve (that doesn’t mean there aren’t already some ideas and solutions floating around though). To analyze behavior, feelings and attitudes of our users we need to start talking to them. This is exactly what we’re going to do via qualitative research methods like a focus group, and at the moment we’re collecting love and breakup letters from people to their smartphone. The last method is meant to make people think about their relationship (literally) with their beloved, or hated, device. Oh, and don’t forget our game, the research tool that is going to help us with mapping our user’s knowledge about the life cycle of the smartphone.
Besides researching we’re doing our best to keep contact with the different teams from Barcelona and Bangalore. We recently spoke to the Barcelona team for the first time. Their way of working is oriented towards finding trends, quite important as well: during our period they will solely focus on researching these trends. This means that they will not deliver a prototype like we will, they will start the development in 2016, when our MediaLab project has already finished. This brings us on a slightly different level, but hopefully we’ll be able to benefit from each others research and prototypes. We also had an extensive chat with Bangalore, and exchanged our sprint goals. This sprint we will both start defining some core problems, since our goals are more aligned it should be interesting to compare our results during the next presentation.