Imagine a World

Yesterday was the Phase 2 Design Review for UOCD, so I spent most of Wednesday (and a total of more than 22 hours over the past 6 days) in my team's corner of the design studio. There are many pictures and some description of what we've been doing below the fold!

Our space on Wednesday. We're going to reorganize it a little for the final phase, so there will be pictures of that next week!

User portraits from our visits during Phase 1

Our strategy setting polyhedra! For each phase we have to talk about our goals for the phase and how we want accomplish those goals. In Phase 1, we decided to make a post-it Rubik's cube for our strategy setting. In Phase 2, we chose to stay with the Platonic solid theme and make an octahedron.

Some of our materials from our first design review, including areas of opportunity, why and how our users enjoy math, some frameworks, and our personas.

All the ideas we had in this phase, classified by areas of opportunity (the pink index cards at the top).

A few of the raw ideas that we developed more. This development involved making sketches and scenarios, giving the ideas evocative names, and identifying which user values and areas of opportunity they addressed.

Phase 2 was all about using what we learned in Phase 1 to generate ideas and eventually identify a couple of bold concepts for services or products that would benefit our users, recreational mathematicians. We looked at the areas of opportunity we had found at the end of Phase 1 and generated ideas based on those. We went back and talked to four of the users we'd visited in Phase 1, and one of our team members, Sasha, also attended Gathering 4 Gardner, a biannual meeting of recreational mathematicians and magicians. When we met with users, we gathered new information, presented our own ideas for feedback and did codesign (or participatory design).

After meeting with a couple of users and going through our ideas, we settled on about seven to flesh out, and we sent Sasha to Gardner with gallery sketches or sketch models of those ideas. Those seven have been modified through suggestions and codesign with users, and we've eventually come to two concepts that we want to carry forward into Phase 3. The way we approached the design review -- the way we framed these ideas -- is by looking at our users' current world and imagining a better one.

Here are our new worlds.

The first concept is the Shape Share, which is a result of several ideas evolving and combining as we worked with users. A lot of our users design puzzles or mathematical art, and they often either want to go from a physical object to a CAD model or the other way around, and the Shape Share will allow both. It helps with rapid prototyping and quickly showing someone an ideal physically and visually.

A sketch model of one of the ideas that led to the Shape Share. (This one was called the Telepuzzler.) We took this on user visits and had our users show us how they would want to interact with it.

The second concept is the Puzzle Cafe, which we're imagining as a puzzle/mathematical art cafe. At the moment, the efforts of the recreational math community to spread their love of math aren't very effective at reaching outside the community. For example, it's Math Awareness Month, but so far we've only seen people within the established community talking about it. The Puzzle Cafe would be a public space to play with math, and it would help our users reach outside their community in a more effective way. It would also provide a place for small, casual gatherings of our users, whereas events like Gardner and the International Puzzle Party are annual or biannual, larger, by invitation only, and more formal.

Our design review went well, and my team received some good feedback. We're definitely excited for the last phase of the project!

An empty room for our users to fill with post-its and objects during co-design. We used this with users in discussing our couple of ideas, one of which became the Puzzle Cafe.

Our sketch model of the Puzzle Cafe (at the time called the Puzzle Kitchen).