I attended the very first ever Design Jam on Saturday, 20 November 2010. 10 teams were set a challenge and given 8 hours to produce a prototype each that solves the problem. All my life I have been designing based on my creative skills and 6th sense of what it is a client really wants. With experience design maturing into a recognisable and successful practice this kind of ‘design’ session highlights gaps in the level of experience design being practised. It therefore also allows a bunch of enthusiastic designers, developers and artists to learn from each other in order to provide better service to their client and raise the profile of experience design.
With only 8 hours (plus a lunch break) there really wasn’t alot of time to mess about. Leisa Reichelt, in her blog, mentions some good tips on how to get quickly to iterating and forming a design in time short sessions like this. Here is a summary of those points from her blog:
- Spend less time choosing your idea and more time defining it. Specifically, what problem are you solving?
- Define your audience by understanding the important behavioural characteristics.
- Get sketching! Generate and evaluate lots of design solutions before you start wireframing
- A group is a resource and a liability (user your numbers, appoint a facilitator)
- Pitch clearly and persuasively
Here are am with our team "MindStorm" discussing our ideas with Leisa Reichelt
MindStorm - Sketching the ideas for paper prototyping
Here is the MindStorm App (my design!) being discussed - we were the only ones to get it this finished!
The MindStorm team:
- Marcin Grodzicki, @3marcin
- Eewei Chen (me) @ultraman
- Kuba Kucharski, @83tb
- Keng @kengggg @kengggg
- Tom @whoojemaflip
Read more about the day here:
