Looking for a Direction
With one glance at the picture above it becomes obvious that the man in the boat is looking for a navigation. The reason I chose this picture, is that his position can represent the state of our team in the first week of the MediaLAB project. There is a sea of subjects that are related to our project (that goes by the name Smart Citizens and Sustainability). Furthermore we needed to communicate with some different boats to decide our direction together. The other ships: the Bangalore team from the Fields of View, the team of designers from Barcelona, and the mothership and our commissioner: Cisco Systems.
Enough metaphors for now, practically we had to decide on a subject together, and we connected via a state of the art digital conference technology at Cisco’s office. At this meeting we showed our interpretation of the subject via the ‘doodle’ video we produced. Then we started discussing the different possible subjects.What turns out: sustainability is a totally different subject in Bangalore then it is in Amsterdam and Barcelona.
While we were brainstorming about ways to save energy or water, the Bangalore team would add that water and energy aren’t constantly available in India. Urging people to save more of something that is already scarce doesn’t sound logical. The next step was finding out on what level the teams would operate, we concluded that sustainability for the Bangalore team would be addressed on a macro level of communities, and the teams in Europe would put their focus on the micro level of the household and the individual. We were moving forward, but we weren’t able to decide on concrete subject yet…
The next day, Marco our coach came to an agreement with the Bangalore team that we should focus on the subject of personal electronics. Super nice! We we’re excited to have some more clarity, but there still was (and is) a lot of narrowing down to be done. Currently we are busy uncovering the problems with sustainability within the whole consumer cycle of personal electronics. On the other hand, we need to find out more about the product life cycle of personal electronics as well, since we believe these two things are somehow connected. The workshops in scrum, visual thinking and defining intentions is giving us some tools for getting a more thorough understanding of our subject and the possible problems we might want to address.
As a first Sprint Goal we decided that we want to create a (board) game that can function as a research tool to uncover the attitudes, behaviors and experiences people have towards their personal electronics devices. But first a lot more research and prototyping has to be done to be able to create a relevant and entertaining game.