Along with being introduced to this final year we were given a short group project as an almost “warm up exercise” for our design skills and working quickly. I thought this was a great idea as it has been over a month since my placement ended and I have done very little design work in the mean time.
This project is called ‘Zeitgeist’ and in our groups we should choose from a list of zeitgeist topics (shown below) and explore a product, service or system that would address the chosen topic.
My group consisted of Beth, Nicole, Lauren, Jess and I. We started our idea generation process by putting post it notes next to the topic choices available.
A screenshot of our Brainstorming session on Miro
We then decided on Beth’s idea under the topic of homelessness.
The idea for this product would be a digital service that would allow a homeless person to receive mail that could include important documents to do with jobs and benefits. They would be able to give a virtual or temporary address to these services and then would receive an SMS notification when their mail has been received. There was also the possibility of a mail scanning service that would allow for physical mail to be scanned and uploaded to this service so the person can access those documents anywhere.
chosen idea from Beth
The initial concerns with this product that we would have to consider are:
Beth found some information that said that most homeless people own a basic phone, few own a smartphone.
I thought that it would be a good idea to make this product a web app so some homeless people could access it on smartphones, if they have one, but others could access it from public computers such as in libraries.
From this we were able to create our problem statement and solution.
We then split the work up between us and it was decided that Beth, Lauren and I would some further issue into this problem and user research.