Critical Justification 1 Laura Dobson
Contents Chapter 1 : Introduction Reading this Book 5
Overview 7 Time Plan 8-9
Chapter 2 : Exploration Phase Proposing a Direction 13
In the News 15 Interviewing Parents & Teachers 16-21 Interviews & Observations 22-29 Reflection 30-33
Chapter 3 : Ideation Criteria So Far 36-39
Idea Generation 40-45 Redefining Brief 47 News Reports 49 User Group Ideas 50-55 First Concept 56-61
Chapter 4 : Development Criteria 65
Exploration Feedback 66-69 Market Research 70-73 User Experience Development 74-79 Redefining Brief 80-87 Model Making 88-91 Branding Exercise 93 Industry Feedback 94-97 Reflection 99 Final Brief 101 Time Plan 102-103
Reading this book Personal
Anything highlighted, underlined or circled in green within this book represents me directing the project and reflecting on activities undertaken.
External
Anything highlighted, underlined or circled in blue within this book represents something an external interviewee/collaborator has said which has impacted my project.
Tutor Feedback
Anything highlighted, underlined or circled in purple within this book represents feedback from the team of lecturers and tutors.
These circles indicate where key decisions were made and what that means for my project criteria. At intervals throughout this book there will be pages explaining what these icons mean.
At the bottom of each right hand page these reminders will appear so there’s no need to flick back!
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Overview and Project Goal As a self confessed outdoor lover, I am really passionate about people spending time outdoors and the benefits it can have to their health. More specifically, I feel that the current generation of children aren’t spending enough time outdoors to benefit their health. The aim of this project is to encourage outdoor play and interaction with outdoor materials.
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Start October Project briefing Submit exploration proposal Background research
November
Refine project brief
December
Exploration
Interim
January
Develop key research questions Contact industry experts Make use of experts
Exploration Deadline
February
Ideation
Continue to research more in depth Begin ideation process Market Research Develop concepts
March
Finalise
Interim Review Exploration feedback Contact possible collaborators Finalise concept idea
Now
Time Plan To make use of the time I have to complete this project it was important to make sure I used my time as effectively as possible. I mapped out the essential and most important tasks I needed to complete for the project. This really helped me to visualise where I should be each week and although there is not a great amount of detail shown it helped me to set my own deadlines and make sure I was keeping up.
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Exploration Phase
Howard encouraged me to think about what I wanted to do after finishing University and this helped me to create this proposal.
Proposed Direction I initially found it very difficult to come up with a proposal that I felt had enough scope to allow me to produce a good project that would keep me interested over the following months. At this stage I had no idea what my final outcome could be. During my last 6 month placement, I learned a lot about the education industry, specifically the toy and furniture market. I decided to propose a brief with the aim of encouraging children to spend more time outdoors. I understood from professionals I was working under that there is currently a great need to get children outdoors and engaging in physical activity more often.
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1. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/10747841/Children-spend-less-than-30-minutes-playing-outside-a-week.html 2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-19870199 3. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/children-banned-playing-outside-housing-6439019 4. c http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-24670232 5. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2385722/Parents-anxieties-children-playing-indoors-Fears-traffic-strangers-leading-creeping-disappearance-youngsters-parks.html
In the News After submitting my proposal I was unsure of where to start my research so I looked at recent news headlines surrounding my topic to help me to pin point areas of interest. From this I came up with three research questions I needed to answer, which gave me an initial starting point; - What anxieties do parents have and why? - What puts children off playing outside? - Why is screen time so appealing and why don’t parents limit it?
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Helen Bell
Three children aged 7, 9 and 13 All of Helen’s children are allowed to play at the local park, although the youngest must be supervised by one of the older children.
Robert Wall
One child age 4 Rob discarded traffic and bullying, explaining they were not applicable because his son only plays outdoors when supervised, Rob said ‘out of sight is worry even if he’s just in the garden and I have to run for the phone or something.’
In hindsight, I should have asked Helen to complete the task separately for each of her children, so I could see if there were differences in the response for different ages. I had to bare this in mind when I spoke to other parents with multiple children.
Talking to Parents This task aimed to answer the question about whether parents anxieties are keeping children indoors. Instead of just doing a straight forward interview, Laura Warwick advised me to think about what I really wanted to find out and create some kind of conversation cue so I could get as much out of this research task as possible. I listed all the concerns that parents may have, I used online articles and books to help me. I created small cards illustrating these concerns and asked parents to rate them in order of most to least concerning. I found it really helped parents to talk about specific things that worried them rather than just explaining that they feel anxious.
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7+
Under 7’s
I found that there was a clear difference between under 7’s and 7+. I was able to summarise these differences and present two sets of results.
I used 12 parents in total, 6 in each age category, I asked Laura Warwick if I should use more and she told me as long as I could prove there was a pattern in my results, which there was, I didn’t need to find anymore parents to complete the task.
This task helped me to understand parents anxieties at different stages of childhood. It showed me that I should target a specific age group because the anxieties were very different and it would be almost impossible to target both. I needed to do more research around both age groups to decide which one I am designing for.
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Talking to Teachers A similar exercise to the one carried out with parents, I created a card for each subject at school. The aim of this task was to find out if there was any areas for improvement within the national curriculum. I asked teachers to place the cards in order of most to least likely to have lessons take place outdoors. I found that the majority of the teachers I spoke to had lesson plans for outdoor activity in most subjects and so I discarded primary school lessons as an area of interest as I felt there was no need to pursue this direction.
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Hands on interaction with outdoor materials
Interviewing & Observations Walby Farm Park
I found interviewing people face to face was much easier than talking to them over the phone or via email. When I interviewed Nick Hastings from Walby Farm Park it was really easy to see his enthusiasm for the outdoors just from his body language during the interview. I stayed at the farm park for a few hours after the interview to observe how children interacted with the animals. I asked Nick what was most important about outdoor play and he told me ‘I can’t stress enough how it important it is for children of all ages to have contact with mud, dirt, grass, animals whatever it might be because all that bacteria contributes to a healthy immune system and can help prevent allergies.’ Hands on contact with natural materials became one of my criteria as a result of this.
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Interviewing & Observations Scotby Pre-school
I observed a morning session at Scotby Pre-school and found this really useful because it helped me to narrow down my age group. I found that this age group (2 to 4) were generally all very happy to go outside and had a lot of fun playing in large groups. Nursery teachers advised me to look at older children who want to play outside unsupervised by parents or teachers. I was unable to take photographs due to ethical issues and consent so I used characters to illustrate these findings in my exploration. From this I learned that I should be targeting an older age group, although the first task I completed with teachers was unsuccessful I decided a straight forward interview with a primary school teacher might help to determine my age bracket.
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7 to 11 years old Age group
For time spent at home
Interview
Laura Cathcart - Primary School Teachers After seeing that the children at pre-school age were happy play outside I decided to speak to primary school teachers as they come into contact with children from 4 years old all the way up to 11 years old. I met with Laura Cathcart and discussed how behaviour and attitude towards outdoor play and physical activity changes as children get older. “Personally I think kids get enough outdoor time at school, they spend at least an hour a day in the playground and another hour if they have a PE lesson. Not many of the children in key stage two talk about spending time outdoors at home when we ask what they did at the weekend.� This is the point where I decided my project would focus on time spent at home rather than at school and my age group would be somewhere between 7 and 11 (key stage 2).
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Debbie Beeks Laura Warwick put me in contact with Debbie Beeks at Seven Stories to find out how they applied reading to different areas of learning. Although my project had no links with reading, it was the way in which they applied it that I wanted to learn more about. I was due to meet Debbie early on in January but unfortunately she was unwell for a few weeks and I was unable to meet her before the exploration deadline, however she did try to help me out via email. Debbie told me to think about how different outdoor activities can help different areas of a child’s development, I decided my design should aim to exercise the imagination and promote social and problem solving skills although at this point I was unsure how.
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Exploration Hand-In For the exploration hand in, I split my work into 6 sections so it was easy to follow. I presented all my work in a box filled with leaves to try and illustrate the fun my project aims to find through interaction with the outdoors. I labeled each individual research activity clearly so they were easily identifiable and my final part was a short video summarising my findings and what my brief was at this point. I had plenty of time for printing the documents but felt I rushed the video towards they end and I could have added more detail to give the research pack a more definitive ending.
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Reflection What went well during the exploration phase?
Overall I was happy with the outcome of my exploration project, I felt the way I presented it gave it the fun factor I wanted to convey. Speaking to Nick Hastings at the farm park was really worth it, he gave such a different perspective on a child’s relationship with the outdoors to what the teachers and nursery assistants gave me.
What could have gone better?
In reflection I think narrowing down my target age group earlier would have helped me to direct my research to some more useful topics towards the end of this phase. I didn’t feel ready to start the ideation process, hence my proposed solution at the end of exploration was quite vague.
What do I need to do to continue moving forward?
I need to do some in depth market research around the age range I have chosen, analysing good and bad points of products/services which encourage outdoor activity.
I need to be careful that my project doesn’t become too focused on getting children to do physical activity, exploration research presented me with evidence that getting outdoors will in turn improve health and fitness. My aim is to encourage interactions with natural surroundings, not to specifically encourage children to keep fit.
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Ideation
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Criteria so far... 7 to 11 years old Age group
For time spent at home
Hands on interaction with outdoor materials
Questions to be answered... -Is it just a product or a service design? -What does the product do? -How do I aim to reduce parents anxieties?
Refined Brief The brief I gave in the video at the end of exploration didn’t help me to move forward in any way, I don’t think I was quite ready to create a new brief, so at this point I decided to create a more visual brief using the criteria I had already decided was essential so that I could refer back to it at a glance rather than re-reading it every few days. As well as criteria so far, I listed the questions I needed to answer next in order to move forward. This helped visualise where my project was heading and gave me specific tasks to complete.
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Accompanied by website or app
Tackling Technology From the beginning of this project I was aware that by entering the toy market I would be competing with technology, the likes of Xbox, iPad and PlayStation. Following on from exploration, I needed to understand what was so enticing about these games not only for children but for parents too. Find out what is so appealing about apps and video games for children and why aren’t parents doing more to encourage other activities?
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Ideation Mind mapping is always the first thing I do to begin the ideation process. It was useful to get together with others and talk through some ideas, however I found after about 10 minutes this turned into us discussing what we did outdoors when we were children. This didn’t really help me and I decided I needed to limit the time spent on ideas or I ended up going round in circles and having the same conversations.
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Group Rotation/100 Ideas I got together with others in my peer group (and Heather) who were at the same stage and struggling to come up with enough ideas. Each person gave a brief description of their project to begin with, explaining what their intended direction was at this point. Each person was assigned a different colour post it note and we moved around the table spending two minutes on each project and writing as many ideas as we could in that time. We repeated this process until we had filled the table with ideas. Our aim was to get 100 ideas each. This was a great way to start the ideation process, giving ourselves a time limit on each project meant we had to work quickly and couldn’t spend too long deciding if it was a good idea or a bad one, we wrote down everything! I fell just short of 100 ideas with 92. I then collected similar ideas together into groups.
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A lot of ideas that came out of this session were based on some kind of ‘build your own,’ wildlife kit. I liked the idea but knew not all children have hedgehogs and garden birds in the area they live and this would narrow the consumer group.
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Using principles of video games
Redefine Brief Further through the ideation process, I knew I was going round in circles and continually telling myself what the problem was over and over again without actually ideating possible solutions. So I decided to define where I was at with a flow chart. I stuck this right in front of me on my desk and referred back to it a lot, it really helped me to push myself forward, using this in conjuction with my visual icons I began to feel like my project was taking shape. At this point I decided I was no longer being productive with post-it notes and a pen, I needed to get input from a different source.
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Documentaries & News Reports I watched clips of documentaries on outdoor play to see what was already being done, one of the most useful videos I watched was a piece from BBC London News. The news piece showed interviews with two explorers Daniel RavenEllison and Benedict Allen who both expressed concerns about the amount of time the current generation spend outdoors. The turning point for me was when Daniel said ‘even in London, the space is there, the parks are there, people just aren’t using them. It might be because of safety concerns but really we can’t lose sight of the importance of connection with the outdoors as a child.’ This is when I decided to direct my focus on a product based project rather than a space/community project.
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User Group Ideas At the end of exploration I was focusing on children aged 7 to 11. The age of my user group means its difficult to contact them directly unless they are family members, so I went back to Laura Cathcart, the primary school teacher I spoke to during the exploration phase. Laura teaches Year 3 pupils, aged 7 and 8. This was a perfect opportunity to get some suggestions from the intended user group. I know Laura quite well so Facebook messenger was the quickest and easiest what to get hold of her, our conversation was very informal but gave me a lot of help in understanding the user group.
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The children’s ideas really inspired me, their imagination and enthusiasm is evident in each one. I need to use these to assist me in the ideation process, coming up with a plausible solution for each idea will give me 25 child inspired solutions.
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Animals/Characters
Inspiration from recent films and video games
Adventure
Criteria taken from User Group I put all the post-it notes into groups of similar ideas and activities, this allowed me to produce some criteria based on the most popular suggestions. Moving forward this helped me to focus my ideas, using inspiration from the intended user group.
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7 to 11 years old
8 years old
Narrowing the age group After speaking with Laura Cathcart a second time I decided that my age range (7 to 11) was quite large. She explained that there children mature a lot in those 4 years and I could be more specific. Laura Warwick suggested I settle on a target entry age for my product/ service. She explained that it might help to me to decide on an idea and there is no reason why the child would stop using it as they grew up. Laura asked me to decide on my target age before the minor interim. I created a short survey that I could send out to parents via email, I wanted to complete this task quickly so I could move forward with my project before the minor interim. I found that 9 out of 12 parents asked said age 8 or 9 was the age their child wanted to play out unsupervised but parents felt they were still to young. My target entry age is therefore 8 years old.
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Connection between children
Initial Concept When speaking to both nursery and primary school teachers they all stressed the importance of team building, communication and social development as part of outdoor play; therefore I wanted to create a product/service that encourages outdoor play by connection with others. My initial concept was to supply a kit of components which could be used alone but when joined with friends with the same kit, bigger and better activity goals could be achieved. There would be no limit on how many children could be involved. I didn’t really have any idea what this kit would look like, I drew it like a cardboard carry case for illustration purposes. I really liked the idea around the concept and so did my tutor, but I needed to do more work on what these components could be.
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Minor Interim At the minor interim I presented to Neil Smith, Laura Warwick and both peer groups. I used simple illustrations to help describe my idea which worked well. Neil suggested I look at community projects and how I could use spaces that are already available such as allotments and village greens. He encouraged me to think about how much impact I want my project to have on the sense of community in any given area. After further discussion with Laura Warwick I decided that I wanted parents to be involved but I didn’t want to do something conceptual around community spaces, as a designer I am much better at product development and branding activities.
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Development
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Criteria so far... 8 years old Age group
For time spent at home
Hands on interaction with outdoor materials
Accompanied by website or app
Using principles of video games
Connection between children
Parental involvement
Questions that needed answered... -Is it just a product or a service design? I have made the decision that my project should be a product supported by a full service design. A product alone cannot suppress parents anxieties and actively encourage/enhance a child’s outdoor activity. -What does the product do? The product will encourage outdoor activity and enhance social interactions between children, developing social skills and problem solving skills with the use of outdoor materials. -How do I aim to reduce parents anxieties? By involving parents in the process, I hope that their anxieties will reduce over time as they build trust with both the child and the product. The website will target parents worries and help guide them through the process.
New questions to answer... What are the product components? What does the website provide?
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Exploration Feedback I met with my tutor Laura Warwick to receive feedback on my exploration submission. Laura said she understood my submission well, but the second marker struggled slightly to see any conclusions made within the project. Laura explained that other than interviews, my project lacked market research and a thorough, more in depth proposal. Do some thorough market research and product analysis of what already exists, how these could be improved, what works well and what doesn’t.
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Sticking Point In the same meeting as getting my exploration feedback I discussed with Laura Warwick how I could move on with my project as I felt I was stuck and hadn’t moved forward since the minor interim. Laura encouraged me to work backwards, ‘ imagine you’re a mum on mums-net or something similar and you’re reviewing your end product, think about what you want them to experience, from purchasing to the child’s reaction.’ She also told me not to be overly concerned about what the components of my kit will be just yet. Look at some existing products/apps/websites and develop a map of touch points for user experience. Answer the questions; how do I want parents to feel? How do I want children to react?
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Market Research After a discussion with Laura, I understood that being aware of my competitive landscape was extremely important. I looked at existing products, apps and website with the intent of increasing outdoor play. I created a card for each one, initially I didn’t put any detail about what the product/digital platforms did, so I decided to catergorise them...
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Bad points/areas for improvement Good points
Catergorisation and Criteria I put the cards into groups based on whether they were products, apps or websites. I then wrote down a description of what it was used for and a list of good and bad points. Having similar designs side by side made it easy for me to compare them on different features. I picked out some of the good and bad points to build a list of possible features for my design. I found this task particularly useful for the digital part of my service, looking at how other websites and apps encouraged activity using avatars and personalised characters. One of the most important things I took from this research was that both products and digital platforms target either children or adults, but rarely both together, by producing a full service I hope that this is a key feature my design will offer.
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Parent experiences Child experiences Website influence Product influence
Mapping the User Experience After doing market research I knew that understanding where user touch points were and how I reached them was going to be very important. I mapped the user experience along side the product lifetime to establish at what points I wanted parent interactions with the service and child interactions with the service. This helped me come up with some final questions that would need to be answered before I had a well established service proposal...
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Preparing for Major Interim I mapped my user experience digitally so it was visually easier to understand and took it to my peer group session. “Work on answering these questions in black before the major interim so you have a solid proposal.� Laura Warwick If I produce a second version with more detail and these questions answered it will help to explain my project more thoroughly during the interim, I know from the exploration feedback that the way I communicate my project is really important.
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Parents Childhood Memories Whilst discussing with a friend how our projects had progressed, it occurred to me that throughout all the conversations I had had with parents around their children playing outdoors, most of them recalled and told be about something they did as a child, often outdoors and accompanied by a laugh or a smile. I wondered if I could use this recalling memory process to encourage them to let their children play out more often. I thought about how I could use memories to override their anxieties. I constructed a really quick simple survey so I could get a better idea of how many of these childhood memories took place outdoors and the emotions that went with them. I asked questions about where they were, what they were doing and if they were with others eg. siblings, friends, parents etc. A lot of responses that included outdoor play took place with siblings and/or grandparents, I hope to get more parents to complete this task and use this concept subtly somewhere within the website.
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Targeted Market Research I chose to look at existing products that enhanced den building and was suprised to find that the current solutions were quite expensive and not that exciting. I believe there is a simple but exciting solution that will maintain a childs interest longer than these two products, without suppressing the use of imagination.
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Brief Development I created a new brief for my project as the previous one was now very out of date, illustrating more specific requirements gave me a chance to reflect on what I had learned as I wrote it. I felt it was important to explain why I had made these decisions, this would make sure I didn’t back track and would help other understand my project quickly.
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KIT/PRODUCT
8 years old
WEBSITE
Service Criteria & Mapping Using the criteria I have gathered so far I used a simple diagram to show where they fit. The Icons in the middle show a balance between both the physical product and the website, this really helped me as I started to think about designing key features of the service, I was able to clearly see the aims of each part. I used the icons to help me draft a service map so that I could see where the product and website fit at each stage. I need to produce a service map in more detail for the major interim to help communicate an overview of the whole service.
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Sketching I began sketching product ideas but quickly realised this wasn’t helping me because I had no idea of how easy or difficult it was going to be to attach sticks and twigs together. I stopped sketching and decided that I needed to go straight into model making before I could get deeper into the designing. I did find it useful to sketch some ideas of what the product ‘kit’ would look like after being encouraged by Laura Warwick not to just think of it as a box that arrives in the post one day. I need to create something exciting that children will want, somewhere components of the kit can be kept.
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Firstly I used some thick elastic bands to try fastening some pencils together, but I found it difficult to get them tight enough to stay upright and decided quickly that this would be far too hard for an 8 year old to do, they would lose interest. I went to buy some velcro to see how that would compare.
Model Making I was convinced velcro alone wouldn’t be enough to hold sticks together so I used cardboard to make quick models that could possibly make it more effective, but I had no sticks to test it on and decided I couldn’t move on without testing the velcro with real sticks.
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A Day at the Park I decided the only way to move forward with the design of the product was to test it’s intended purpose. I was suprised at how easily the sticks joined together using the velcro ties. I thought they would wobble but they secured quite easily and I was confident this was an easy enough fastening for an 8 year old to use. I am confident at this stage that using velcro within my fastening design would work. I had to push the sticks into the ground to secure them at the bottom so I need to test out what happened on a hard surface like concrete as this may be an area for development.
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User Group Exercise At this point, I felt I had done more development of the product and ignored the website. Market research and the year 3 children’s ideas lead me to the conclusion that I needed some kind or mascot/ character and theme to make it successful. I created 5 sets of characters and asked children to select which set they would choose. Laura Cathcart’s advice on producing this exercise was, ‘keep it simple if you don’t want them to over think it, don’t go into too much detail about what it’s for.’ Taking this advice I briefly explained these characters would appear on a website at the top of the page. The exercise on the right is hopefully going to help me develop the product further or to develop some add ons/extras. I want to see what the imagination of an 8 year old would do when asked to decorate a stick den. I am currently waiting for the exercise sheets to be sent back to me.
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“I love the concept of using a product and a website to actively encourage outdoor play.” Helen, Sales & Customer Service
“I think the most important thing you need to look at is how you know the child has completed a certain task in order to move up a level, if they’re just ticking done on a website they wil cotton on quick!” Carole, Commercial Manager
“Think about how you are going to main tain interest, I like the idea of the kit being in a rucksack but if you got add ons you wouldn’t want another bag.” Rob, Senior Designer
Industry Feedback I visited Twoey Eductaional Resources to get some feedback on my ideas so far. This was extremely useful and I was able to speak to staff in different departments such as sales, design and manufacturing so I got feedback on every aspect of my project. Overall the feedback was encouraging and everyone offered constructive advice. I will definitely keep go back to them for more feedback as I get further through the project.
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Reflection on Industry Feedback To get the most out of my visit to Twoey, I made sure I took ALL of my work with me, so that when I was asked questions I could back up my answers and it allowed people to understand what I was saying quicker. This meant I got a lot out of it and really pleased I got feedback before the major interim as it gave me confidence in the project. It made clear that the next things I need to work on are: - creating a strong brand in accordance with feedback from the year 3 class - work on what the incentive is for children - how do I ensure truthful responses when reaching new levels (web) - what are the rewards and how do you receive them - at what point do I want parents to step back
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Reflection After a slow start following the exploration phase, I am happy with how my project is progressing, I think a combination of product and web based interactions fit the brief perfectly. Moving forward, I need spend some time thinking more in detail about what the website offers for both parents and children, how I will maintain interest and what are the differences between the levels on the website. I found both industry and user group feedback really helpful and will continue to ask for feedback more frequently throughout the next phase. It is really important I take on all the feedback I am given but also continue to drive the project forward in a direction I am happy with where there is a conflict in opinion (between external collabortors).
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Final Brief Design a service that wil actively encourage children to play outdoors and in teract with their surroundings, whilst building confidence in parents to reduce anxieties. The target entry age for the product is 8 years old. The service should include; a product kit containing components specifically designed to enhance outdoor play using natural materials and a website aimed at both parents and their children which will guide them through the service from the day of purchase. The service aims to help parents progress through a transitional period where children become more independent and want to play unsupervised. It is important that parents understand the benefits of outdoor play and that the risks involved are very small. The price point for this service should remain lower than that of kits compared during the market research task to make it available to as many people as possible.
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Parents Feedback
Industry Feedback
User Group Feedback
Tutor/Peer Group
Major Interim
User Group Feedback
Now
April
Iterate Product Components & Kit Design Create Strong Branding Design Website Main Features Create Website Manufacture Components & Kit
With just over 9 weeks left until the final deadline it’s really important that I plan my time. I have pin pointed at what stages I need to get feedback so I don’t leave it too late and I have left around a week at the end and called it ‘just in case’ this spare time in case anything goes wrong throughout the final stages. I found that this layout will be much more useful to me than the first time plan I produced because I can see which tasks overlap. Again, I haven’t gone into too much detail as I find I don’t use time plans effectively when I can’t see where I am at a glance.
Deadline
Parents Validation
Industry Validation
User Group Validation
May
Photography & Video Communication for final deadline Just in Case
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Critical Justification 1 Laura Dobson