Longterm Prototype
I decided to go with my “Ideation 2” to prototype for long term. This is a customizable toolkit for homeowners, renters, and people in an urban setting with little space to grow their own food. The toolkit will address food production, preparation, consumption, and extension.
LONG TERM PROJECT PROTOTYPE + IDEATIONS
For my prototypes I just expanded on my ideations + focused in more on how to serve the potential clients of this program. For my first I decided to focus on creating a website that will help to promote the cause + inform people of the need in communities across the country. The second is focused on a website that will provide existing non-profits with the information they need to implement this program within their existing programs. The third is focused on a print campaign that will help to inform existing non-profits, people within the community + potential users of the program of the existing problems + benefits of the program.
Long Term Prototypes
The first two prototypes are based on an interactive system that allows students to filter through and visually restructure how the information is presented to them. I chose to do one on an iPad and another version for on a regular computer display. My third prototype deals with creating a series of posters that visually explains difficult material in the text.
The Goal: To create a better understanding of what it’s like to live with a social phobia and help distinguish social phobias from general shyness.
To do this I created a poster-book that provides a quick glimpse into what it is like to experience social anxiety. This is done through illustration and playful type. I tried to design this so that if someone just quickly opened it and skimmed it, they would still get the very basics. But if someone did want to know more, I also included some detailed text.
My short-term project addresses the difficulties of educating adult women in Afghanistan, specifically, teaching them how to read. Life under Taliban rule has largely stripped them of human rights, including the right to an education, and because of this acquiring literacy has become more difficult. While the combined efforts of Prime Minister Karzai and the U.S. Government have done some good routing the Taliban from parts of the country, not everywhere is free, and even then remnants of fundamentalist thinking remain.
However, despite these difficulties, people still have the chance to learn. It is not unheard of for literate women to teach other women how to read, sometimes in secret. The goal of my short-term project is to facilitate learning by creating a toolkit that allows women to practice even when not with a teacher.
The result of my project is my final prototype. It is designed to match the material of the burkas that many of the women have to wear. This makes it easily concealable within clothing, and that coupled with its light weight makes carrying it or hiding it easy. The kit comes in two parts that can be packaged together in a cloth.
The first part is a cloth wrap that holds dry erase crayons, pencils, a small magnifying glass, chalk, and sharpeners. The second part is a binder which contains a practice folder and a booklet. The practice folder is a cloth folder with acetate sewn into it. People can then take practice pages from the booklet and insert them into the folder, which allows them to use the dry erase crayons to practice over and over. The booklet is designed to contain a number of stories, poems, rhymes, et cetera that apply to different reading levels. The booklet provides help with pronunciation and syllables, and as a person completes each booklet, they may progress to a new level with slightly harder stories and so on. This helps keep them in the area of proximity, where they feel like they are succeeding, and that feeling helps motivate them to challenge themselves.
My short term project focuses on deforestation in the Borneo rainforest. There are many aboriginal tribes living there that still depend on the resources for shelter, food, medicines, clothing, tools, and other cultural uses.
I used the Forest Stewardship Council’s current labeling system as an entry point. In doing so I was able to manipulate and refine an existing system. The existing system is as such, “Logging companies must follow the Indonesian government’s rules: no logging of endangered species or any tree under 50cm in diameter. The idea is to leave the forest healthy enough to regenerate so it will be productive and profitable well into the future.” The current labeling system is horrible. The tags are small, there is no oversight, the labels are often dismissed, and there is no connection to the local communities.
The iconographic system and toolkit I created for local communities and the Forest Stewardship council to provides a reconstruction of sustainable forestry labeling system based on use and species, addressing important resources for communities. This iconographic identification and forest protection system physically implemented on the land doubles as a subtle advocacy campaign. The toolkit will consist of stencils, tree bands, paint, instruction manuals (catering to FSC), and warning signage for those logging.
I am quite satisfied with the final outcome of my short term system. In terms of next steps and moving forward, I need to experiment with actual materials. I realized that when creating a stencil set for numbers, the alphabet needs to be modified to account for counters and negative spaces. Hierarchically I need to draw more attention to the fact that “THESE TREES CAN’T BE CUT DOWN IF LABELED”. Although I’m satisfied with my iconographic labeling system, I now realize I could have (and will) brought more attention to the fact that the trees can’t be cut down. I look forward to physically constructing my bands, labels, and signage.
Link to non-working prototype wireframe.
Prototype 3
Zack and I were both thinking about doing journals for one of our prototypes, so we combined our questions into one journal for testing. The purpose of this journal pertaining to my project was to inform the students more about the different Intelligences and to prompt them to use different methods to show the same thing, as in the Visual vs. Linguistic page, where he/she could draw a picture or write a poem about what they did that day.
I think this book had good results (We are still waiting on a whole class full of them that we will get back in a week, but for the time being Jordan also filled one of these out for us, so the pages above are all her wonderful work :) She told me that she really liked filling it out and getting to be creative with it, however she said that it might be a lot to complete one page every day with the rest of her homework and all of her sports practices. This might be a good item to implement in class, but I still think that the kids would be more creative at home, away from all of the other students.
Prototype 2
My second prototype pertains to breaking up the flow of just “reading” to learn. The idea of an insert or something built into the textbooks to break up the norm is supposed to tackle different ways that the students can retain the same information, without just reading it. In this example (ignore the textbook because it doesn’t match the questions I wrote) the student would have the option to draw a picture or write a poem.
This will in theory work as another study tool for the kids to remember things by.
I tested this out with Jordan again and she liked the idea a lot. She didn’t like the idea of extra work however. The only problem was that as a 5th grader, they usually don’t take their books home to read. So, the focus of this prototype might need to be geared more toward middle schoolers.
PROTOTYPING SMALL SCALE PROJECT
For my small scale project prototype I wanted to focus on how someone would use the information I am providing through the program. This folder will contain informational flyers specific to a person’s nutritional needs. The user would take the folder along with them when they were shopping for food within their community in order to have a nutritional information resource.
I designed basic folder prototypes & took them along with me while shopping for food. I found that some were too big & got in the way, while others were too small to hold all the needed information. I also found that the folder could have tabbed flyers within it so that they would be easily accessible as well as a place for the user to take their own notes.
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