This blog provides a forum for students, instructors and others to share information and ideas about the Spring Thesis Program at Parsons the New School for Design in New York City.
David, thanks very much for posting news about the user tasting you carried out. As I have said, it is impossible to design successful products without multi-stage human subject testing. It's very important that you were able to see the shortcomings in your design by showing it to your users. Testing is difficult, because it always results in your product basically failing. That's how you find out what to do next.
Now, you are facing a very hard problem, which is to develop a single flat shape that can be assembled into a lot of different 3d configurations. These need to be structurally stable, and there needs to be a number of ways to connect them. The connections have to be robust enough to withstand extensive handling, and they have to be easy to assemble for very little kids, who don't have a lot of fine motor control. I believe that you should check out some existing construction systems to see how others have solved this problem, with varying degrees of success. There is a very interesting kit of parts for prefabricated houses that was developed after WW2 by the architect Walter Gropius (see Dream of the Factory-Made House: Walter Gropius and Konrad Wachsmann). The thing that is interesting about this example is that there were connector pieces and panels, and they could be assembled in many different ways to produce a lot of different building models. You may want to consider a system that uses more than one standard shape, because I believe that would be more engaging to play with, and would lead to the construction of more elaborate and intricate structures.
It is also very important, I think, to give them some form of instructions. You are very talented at making pantomime cartoons that are very clear and helpful. I recommend that you produce an instruction booklet based on your cartoons showing characters building stuff with your system.
In closing: good work on the user testing, now comes the hard part of embedding the lessons you learned in the next iteration of your product. Let me know if you need additional citations and examples of things to look at, or if you want to talk about how to plan your next round of user testing. steven
1 comment:
David, thanks very much for posting news about the user tasting you carried out. As I have said, it is impossible to design successful products without multi-stage human subject testing. It's very important that you were able to see the shortcomings in your design by showing it to your users. Testing is difficult, because it always results in your product basically failing. That's how you find out what to do next.
Now, you are facing a very hard problem, which is to develop a single flat shape that can be assembled into a lot of different 3d configurations. These need to be structurally stable, and there needs to be a number of ways to connect them. The connections have to be robust enough to withstand extensive handling, and they have to be easy to assemble for very little kids, who don't have a lot of fine motor control. I believe that you should check out some existing construction systems to see how others have solved this problem, with varying degrees of success. There is a very interesting kit of parts for prefabricated houses that was developed after WW2 by the architect Walter Gropius (see Dream of the Factory-Made House: Walter Gropius and Konrad Wachsmann). The thing that is interesting about this example is that there were connector pieces and panels, and they could be assembled in many different ways to produce a lot of different building models. You may want to consider a system that uses more than one standard shape, because I believe that would be more engaging to play with, and would lead to the construction of more elaborate and intricate structures.
It is also very important, I think, to give them some form of instructions. You are very talented at making pantomime cartoons that are very clear and helpful. I recommend that you produce an instruction booklet based on your cartoons showing characters building stuff with your system.
In closing: good work on the user testing, now comes the hard part of embedding the lessons you learned in the next iteration of your product. Let me know if you need additional citations and examples of things to look at, or if you want to talk about how to plan your next round of user testing.
steven
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