This week, my group and I met together to discuss the possible stakeholders for our project. We decided to narrow our location to just the Brooklyn borough since Brooklyn is represented by various classes of people. This may become very important in the future of our project when we start choosing our research methods and designing our research experiment. The tool we first used to create our stakeholder map was Miro, which work quite well but we later decided to move over to Figma to keep all details of our project.
During our meeting, we found that it was easy to get stuck in the overall problem of our topic which was waste management/hunger. To mediate this block, we decided to look up multiple videos and articles of past projects or prototypes to inspire us further into our topic. This effectively moved us further along in our process as we were able to come up with various ideas and evolve them into more workable/possible products.
We came up with products like:
A smart fridge that connects to an app to alert you of expiring food.
An independent app that connected communities for composting, delivering leftover foods, etc.
A removable honeycomb-like product that could be inserted into your fridge with special technology to keep food fresh longer.
A fridge with scaling properties to access the lifespan of your food.
Each idea continued to evolve and created a free-flowing experience. We came across many companies and apps that gave us the inspiration presented above. To list view below:
Next, we looked into two research methods that would help us to gather appropriate information from our stakeholders and participants. The methods we decided were the best fit were creative workshops like card-sorting and surveys or polls. Surveys allowed us to create questions specifically tailored to our research and design. This would be to used understand the thought and behavioral process of each participant. The survey is to be published in public forums like our slack group for IDM and within our communities. In the card sorting activity, we will create four buckets pertaining to a prompt we've outlined and then write out a few action items for the participant to categorize in each bucket. This card sort would specifically be closed meaning guided in the topics we are providing. With an open card sort, we would provide action items and allow the participants to create their own buckets. In the interest of time and effectiveness, it is best to keep the method closed.
The audience we would be looking to target would be middle-class households to tackle waste on a micro to macro level. Although, waste is happening at a larger capacity. The effectiveness and visibility into how much waste affects our environment may be more easily digestible on a smaller scale and expanded with more understanding.
Here's a link to our presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1IvyF5_78VzuUUobc19uI3h8k02YzimGd8T4juptGPU8/edit?usp=sharing