Summary Design Exercise

In this exercise we split our six person group into two three person teams and both groups were tasked with creating a tangible model for our final product, namely a load-balancing system for a museum of art. To spice up the exercise both teams were given a specific theme. Group A (Petter, Robert, Jonas) were to make a whacky design, something truly outside the box, while group B (Ted, Axel, David) were tasked with making a mundane but extremely feasible design.

Both groups found that a detector system at the entrances of each of the gallery halls would be the best way to track the number of people in each of the gallery and thus monitor the flow of traffic inside the museum.

Group A spitballed some crazy designs, and talk quickly turn to what can only be described as the realm of science fiction, beamers and floorcovering conveyor belts all. The group however decided on a whacky, but still feasible, idea namely a point based game system where visitors to the museums would gather points by being in less populated galleries, points that could be exchanged for prizes at the end of the museum tour, and thus incentivising people to move around rather than clogging up the most popular exhibits. These points would be stored and recorded by either a central computer system or a smartphone application that would let the visitor know exactly how many people were in each room and how many points he had already gathered.

Group B focused on an interactive map that would not only inform the visitor about the population level in each gallery and the restaurant but also contain information about both the exhibits and the artworks themselves. we discussed several ways of implementing this but came to the conclusion that the most effective way of preserving a good flow of people in the gallery halls was simply to inform the people on which halls were emptier than others and thus people would gravitate towards these rooms. And thus no other other incentives were required.

Naturally group A’s idea was met with an air of incredulousness but in the end we decided to try to incorporate an incentive system into the application. The idea of door mounted detectors was well received by both groups and it is in all likelihood going to be a fixture of our final product. In this exercise both group A and B used tools discussed in the related prototyping lecture, the photography-powerpoint method demonstrated during the lecture, along with paper, post-it stickers and drawing utensils. These tools allowed us to better demonstrate to our peers what our ideas and thought processes were when working on our designs. This exercise also highlighted the importance of a purely theoretical brainstorming session and we felt the exercise to be both a extremely creative interlude but also as a valuable bonding and team-building session.

Early prototype sketches.
 
Picture 1: Simplified navigational assist and flow control. The colourful people are representing the amount of people in the current room. 

Picture 2: If you press a specific exhibit, then you get more information about that room and also shows again the amount, not precise, of people in that room.