Reflecting on the course

Our design process has now come to an end and it’s time to reflect upon the results and the process itself in order to improve ourselves. We think it has been an enjoyable journey although there are some things that we might have done differently if we could do it again. For example, it hasn’t always been easy to schedule meetings with five people who have completely different schedules. It would probably have been easier if all people in the group took the same courses.

In hindsight we should probably have chosen a less ambitious idea to work on, since the objective wasn’t to have the most innovative idea but to learn how to run a successful design process. The fact that our design had such futuristic technology made several of the steps more difficult than they needed to be. The two most obvious examples of this were when we built and tested the prototypes. As they were so different from the original idea, it was very hard to get our point across to the testers.

We did not apply brainstorming to the same extent that was recommended, but we feel this was a good decision. Us having our own time to reflect on the project rendered several good ideas, and after reading a little bit more about brainstorming it has become clear that it is more popular than it is effective. In an article about a study conducted by Michael Diehl and Wolfgang Stroebe (Michael Diehl; Wolfgang Stroebe (1991). "Productivity Loss in Idea-Generating Groups: Tracking Down the Blocking Effect". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology), it is concluded that a group that uses the technique that we used (discussing ideas, having our own time to think and then meeting again) came up with both more and better ideas than a group that used brainstorming.

In our design process we had some design constraints, one being that the product should allow the children and their guardians to have a shared experience of the exhibitions in the museum. We really thought about this and had a lot of ideas to make sure that this was actually implemented in the design, but with our difficulties in building a prototype that actually reflected the product that we designed, this was unfortunately a bit forgotten. Therefore we think this might not have been clear to the audience when we presented our product.

Overall we are pretty pleased with both our design and our process. We had a Facebook-group which made it easier to communicate fast and efficiently, as well as keeping discussions in different threads to make it easy to find the information you were looking for. We feel that we were successful in following the steps of a design process recommended in the course, and that the whole group had a good understanding of the concepts and methods. The fact that we can identify things we would have done differently doesn’t feel like a disappointment, but only like we have managed to learn something.