@TweetingSeat

@tweetingseat

Chris McNicholl (our intern last year) is completing his 4th and final year at Product Design, Dundee University. Read more about his final year project here!

NCR Student Design Competition: 2010 – The Final

The Final

On Friday the 10th December 3rd year product design students from Gray’s School of Art, Dundee University and Edinburgh College of Art gathered in the impressive surroundings of the Sculpture Court at Edinburgh College of Art to participate in the judging session of the NCR | Scottish Student Design Competition. In this sixth year of the competition NCR was supported and assisted by Creative Scotland, Scottish Enterprise and V&A at Dundee.

The competition launched in Aberdeen on the 15th October with introductory presentations by Caroline Parkinson, Creative Scotland, Paul Harris, Head of Gray’s School of Art and Charlie Rohan, NCR. The brief – ‘Experience a new world of interaction’ – Explore what this could mean to you and your generation in the next 2 years. What is the new world of self-service interaction? Research and understand what people want their experience to be in relation to a particular area of self-service. Demonstrate how the consumers experience is facilitated through a concept design. The initial solutions should be able to be brought to market in a 2 year time frame.

45 students participated, each gave a two minutes long pitch ‘Dragon’s Den’ style to the judges (Caroline Parkinson [Creative Scotland], Joyce Matthew [Scottish Enterprise], Georgina Follet [V&A at Dundee], Steven Birnie and Charlie Rohan [both NCR] and their peers. A shortlist was then created and 8 asked back to give a more detailed presentation.

Callum Brown presenting his concept

The winners were:

1st place: Callum Brown

Project Name: Travel Phone
From: Dundee University
Prizes: 12 week paid internship at NCR, summer 2011
iPad
Commemorative plaque
NCR ATM Moneybox

2nd Place: Charlotta Hellichius

Project name: Make Your Mark
From: Edinburgh College of Art
Prizes : iPod Touch
Commemorative plaque
NCR ATM Moneybox

3rd Place:  Helen Fisher

Project name: Make up and Skin Care Advisor

From: Edinburgh College of Art
Prizes : iPod Touch
Commemorative plaque
NCR ATM Moneybox

NCR Competition Award

Charlie Rohan made the point that this type of cooperation between advocates of design and innovation across government bodies; the museum sector; academia and industry was a unique model and provided the students with a challenging project and insight into a commercially driven design process.  Though our continued support of this program NCR has gained insight and access to some of the best emerging design talent in Scotland.

Ideas Day

Ideas Day

My blog posts are not always up-to-date or in chronological order…and this Ideas Day post is an example this.

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to attend the Ideas Day event at Dundee University as part of Product Design course. The event is an opportunity for the final year students to get input from industry on their projects. As ever the students work, even at this early stage, was well considered, thought provoking and showed great potential for some interesting outcomes.

Ideas Day

At the end of the day we were invited to debate on interesting topics like the future of social media and what will product design be in 10 years.

On this years bill was:

Abigail Sellen (Microsoft Research)
Tim Regan (Microsoft Research)
Richard Banks (Microsoft Research)
Tim Brook (Nokia Research)
Steve Birnie (NCR)
Charlie Rohan (NCR)
Bill Gaver (Goldsmiths)
Chris Speed (Edinburgh College of Art)
Kenny Anderson a.k.a. King Creosote (Fencecollective).

Ideas Day debate

IxTEC

Interactions | Transactions | Environment | Consumer

I have recently embarked on a new collaborative consumer focused study with Paul Gault (a fellow PhD student sponsored by NCR) called IxTEC. The project has several has several core aims: To develop methods for design research, to develop a richer understanding of consumers and their desired experience when interacting with self-service technology and for the research to ultimately feed into the Cx Design Strategy at NCR.

MSc Ethnography Post-it Session: Interactions

The first part of the ongoing study has involved engaging with the MSc Ethnography course at Dundee University. Through a series of activities from virtual postcard questionnaires, video probes, street work and several ethnographic post-it sessions a rich collection of information has been gathered. The process of this activity is as important to our research as the actual outcomes and it has been excellent having the ethnography course involved.

A full breakdown of the project so far can be found here.

The next stages of this study will be to collate, understand and articulate all the information that has been collected. Once that stage is complete the information will generate content for a series of consumer focused workshops and further development of design research and consumer engagement methods.

Connection Boxes: Mk II

Connection Boxes MkII

The connection boxes have had an upgrade! Now fitted with a super strong wireless chip which means they do not all need to be connected to each other. This is much more in line with the original concept and should make them much more reliable.

They have been installed in Dance Base as of last week. They are essentially a blank canvas for the Dance Base team. I will be interested to conduct further studies with them to understand what feedback they have uploaded onto them and how successful they have been in attracting customers to use them.

As part of the feedback I will be trying to understand what makes a consumer use a self-service device? What type or level of reward/feedback is appropriate? Also, what makes a consumer use the device again and again, how can you instil loyalty in a device?

The video includes sounds that were created by the Dance Base team. They were deliberately fun and even slightly cheeky to reflect the Dance Base ethos, environment and marketing strategy.

IxDA Dundee

IxDA Pencil DJ

IxDA Dundee

Last night I attended the 1st IxDA event. The event was about bringing together a bunch of like-minded individuals to chat about and drink over all things interaction…

The event was pulled together over a 2 week period by many individuals working together so all credit to them for getting it organised so quickly.

The Dundee chapter of IxDA is in its infancy but will hopefully be something that will build and grow as the word gets out there. It would be great to see more individuals from the design/interaction industry involved in future events.

Everyone who attended the event was invited to have a go on the Pencil DJ – it really was so cool! Using Arduino the “DJ” created a path of resistance in graphite that would control a series of sounds. It was really interesting how the different graphite shapes would create different sounds and when put together with the other “DJs” it sounded surprisingly good!

DJ-ing with a Pencil!

Video Probes

Since my first post on Video Probes I have been developing the use of the design research method through a series of studies. The video probe is a specific time framed video response to a question. The first study was conducted with Dance Base (as previously posted). The participants were asked – “what are your perceptions of dance base?” The responses were then used to help inspire and inform the design of the connected Collection Boxes as well as gain a greater understanding of the people and place.

Video 1:

Video 2:

Video 3:

The second study was conducted with MSc Ethnography students at Dundee University as part of a deeper study into self-service (more about that later). The student groups approached the probes in very different and interesting ways. Some using it more as a field work tool, others to strengthen their initial insights, others were able to communicate their insights through the probes in a very clear thought provoking way.

The groups were split to focus their field observations on different influencing factors of self-service – Interactions, Transactions, Environment, Consumers.

Their Video Probes can be viewed below

Interactions: 

Transactions: 

Environment: 

Consumers: 

We will now be using the insights from the Video Probes and other activities to inform a project that aims to gain a greater understanding of consumers in relation to self-serivce.

Research Training

Yesterday I attended a Reseach Training workshop hosted by Jeanette Paul (Dundee University) and Dr Julian Malins (The Robert Gordons University) at the DCA in Dundee. The event was a joint venture between Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee and Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen.

 

Research Training Workshop

 The workshop discussed and informed us on areas such as contextual review, keeping focus, understanding your argument and the process of review. There was also a useful resource sharing exercise – great for someone at my stage of study.

Professor Tom Inns held an interesting excersise on mapping out your research topic. The Knowledge Mapping method I found very insightful – I even suprised myself at how focused I actually was! The method allowed me to illustrate, who, what and how people, things and literature had and continues to influence my academic research. Displaying your Knowledge Map allowed others to see your topic of interest which sparked up collaborations, discussions and the swapping of the odd business card.

 

My research map