Posted on October 18th, 2011
As part of our project in Interactive Design, we had to find an informant who could relate to our subject. The subject we choosed to work with is knowledge. Mainly knowledge among elders and their life experience. Our informant was Dorte, a woman that Emma already was familiar with – and she therefore knew that she would fit right in. It was important for us, that our informant could see itself or know about the possible consumers for our product. The use of the informant was of course for sparing, so it’s logic that if they could provide with knowledge we were not aware off, it would be a success.
The informant
We met Dorte the first time when we welcomed her at the Metro station at DR Byen. From here we walked to ITU, and found a nice cornor in our student cafe Analog. The meeting was planned to be as casual as possible, so we bought some cookies and coffee. Dorte told us about her life, what she liked to do and what she didn’t like to do. Some questions were asked about how she would see her share her own knowledge, and this was where we really got excited and confirmed ourselves in the choice we made. Dorte told us that it was hard, for her as an ex-teacher, to contribute with the knowledge she had. It was just not always accepted to add in some wisdom, because it for some seemed a little arrogant.
Until this point Dorte knew very little about our project. So we decided that it was our turn, and showed her our brainstorming and told her about our project. Again we got confirmed in the subject, but this time by Dorte. She told us that the idea was very good, and had some great ideas that we could work with. One of the things she mentioned was her studies at “Rigsarkivet”, an archive in Denmark where all the old documents are being stored (some newer ones as well). It was interesting to hear how it worked. Since none of us have been there we decided to have the second meeting there instead.
Back to the agenda of the meeting
We still missed one important part of our meeting. With Dorte we had to draw a timeline showing a good day. Post-its and 1 big a3 was all we needed. It allowed us to quickly re-arrange, draw and trash different parts of the good day, if she would regret a thing or two. A video camera was placed on a tripod (made of books) to give an overview of the process. It all was edited to make a time lapse of the process. Now we can look at it, and see what changes that were made and even reflect on our choices. Some of the post-its were moved several times and rewritten, showing how hard it actually can be to put priorities on a “good day”. The choice of post-it made it easy and fast to make, but the final result was very messy. For that reason we decided to spend sometime after the meeting, to make a clean version with illustrations, which you can see.
Here is an embedded version of the time lapse, enjoy!
Øvelse 6 – BIID from Simon Lind on Vimeo.