NCR | MSc PD | NID…live(ish) update

Wednesday 18th

THE PROJECT BEGINS

It has been a while since I blogged but so much has happened from The Small Society Lab, the NCR design competition 2011 and community workshops…

BUT now I am over in NID in Ahmedabad, India…so this is what this blog post is going to be about.

NCR have sponsored the MSc Product Design (MSc PD) team to gather insights into access to and use of mobile technology and the internet in India.

The use of mobile technologies and communications in India over the past 5/10 years has been prolific.  India has the world’s second largest number of mobile phone users with over 881 million as of October 2011.  Although the percentage of population that have access to the internet in any form is low there are still 40 million users who use their mobiles to access the internet.

In countries such as the UK use of the internet has started with fixed line access due to the nature of legacy copper cable infrastructure. Where in many Western countries the advent of mobile technologies was seen as an evolutionary step forward, in developing nations it could be seen as a mobile revolution, bypassing infrastructure investments other countries have made.

India does not have the same legacy issues as the UK; they can effectively leap-frog the UK and move to a much more mobile and inherently accessible mode of internet access. With countries such as India, China and those in Africa spearheading the mobile revolution companies, like NCR, are looking to them to understand how business and consumers are adopting mobile technologies and the opportunities this may create.

The team have had a day of just getting used to the environment and the have had some initial introductions with stage 4 NID product design students. It was a day of tuktuk rides, mad traffic, street life and indian culture!

The MSc PD team

 

Thursday 19th 

GETTING DATA AND INSIGHTS

Mobile insights questionnaire

One of the main aims of the trip is to gather not only insights but some tangle data on mobile habits and the internet. We want to understand who uses these service and how. One way of collecting this data is through a questionnaire. The key thing with the creation of the questionnaire is to do it collaboratively with the NID students. Doing it this way meant we were able to ask the right questions and target specific areas that we would otherwise have missed.

As ever the NID students have been great. We sent an hour in a focus group co-designing the  questionnaire. From there we were able to draft up an initial layout and test it in NID. That done we were confident we could get out on the street, speak to people, get data and insights!

The first 10 interviewees

 

Friday 20th

SERVICE JOURNEYS

The students have spent the day interviewing people about their mobile phone use and how they use the internet. It is interesting to see the cultural differences coming to light. We hope to build up some nice infographics from the data to clearly illustrate the breadth of people we connected with, consumer trends and insights.

Service Journeys

In parallel to this the team have been doing some service mapping. We have targeted areas relevant to NCR lines of business, from Banking, Retail and Travel. These help us understand the stages of a particular journey. Mapping this out not only shows us the current touch points in a particular transaction/service but also opportunities for design thinking, self-service, new interactions.

Document mapping

As a group we also need to consider the final document, we have spent time this evening developing the layout. The format is going to be in a news paper style so we have been doing some research into news papers in India to give the document some cultural founding and context. One thing is for sure is that we will not be struggling for content! The good thing with planning the layout now is that it will give me and the students focus to the insights we gather, photos we take and life we document.

Document Layout

 

Saturday 21st

STREET LIFE

Street life in Ahmedabad is LOUD, BUSY, INTENSE and DUSTY…It take some getting used to and can be quite overwhelming. I have send the day neck deep in it all. I wanted to experience first hand what it was all like as for too long on this trip I have been stuck in NID. I have been trying to document street services, self-service objects, graphics, signage and interactions.

Its can be hard to create order out of the chaos. Putting design filters on all the content out there on the street helps (well helps me anyway..)

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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.

Ive joined the flock

 

I guess it was only a matter of time..@stevenjbirnie

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

Anab Jain

Anab Jain at Product Design Research Dundee

The Product Design Research team met with Anab Jain yesterday. It was a good to get the opportunity to sit down with her individually and talk through our own research area and get her valued input.

Founder of Superflux and the instigator of The Power of 8 Anab has experience in interaction and service design, research, filmmaking and speculative design. Her experience in film making on various projects was particularly useful for me – thanks Anab!

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!

Fast Company article

Fast Company have recently done an article on a range of concepts that came out of the Cx team. It is always good to get some positive press so as a team we are pleased to see our work getting good visibility.

Fast Company

Fast Company article