Other design activities we've tried

Alongside the design activities being presented in lecture, our team has tried out some additional activities over the course of the past few weeks:

Pinterest board

• Intended to be used as an image or mood board. Our team has used it as a source of design inspiration, and to explore existing products.

Parallel Prototyping

• We tested out multiple concepts concurrently during the bodystorming activity in Week 5. To do so we made paper/cardboard prototypes to act out scenarios, as well as explain concepts to other team members.
• Later on we also used paper prototypes to explain our concepts to users during the user evaluation phase. We found that having something 3D in front of a person was much more effective than simply communicating our idea verbally, or just asking someone to read about it on a concept card.
• All in all, we made paper/cardboard prototypes for four of our concepts, excluding the final prototype for Pirate Ship: 'Grid It', 'Asobu Box', 'Pirate Ship' (paper version), and 'Barnyard Bounce'.

Design Studio Methodology

• See our previous blog post
• Based on a workshop conducted at a UX BNE meetup. More information on the method available here.
• Intended as an iterative way to generate, present and refine ideas by combining group and individual brainstorming in one session.
• Structure of the method (we ended up altering the time and structure for our own purposes)
• 5 minutes individual idea generation
• 3 minutes presenting ideas to a group and refining them through group discussion
• 5 minutes individual idea generation, this time borrowing from concepts that have been presented in the previous group discussion.
• Pros of using this method:
• Allows for cross-pollination of ideas without tendency towards group-think (one person within a group dominating a discussion)
• Fast & flexible method
• Allows team members who have different modes of expression to present their ideas. A team member who is a highly verbal thinker can present their ideas in the group discussion, while a team member who works better by internally going through thoughts in their heads first can take some time to do this before contributing their ideas.