Clockwise
Design Overview:
The goal of this project was to design a product or process to help improve the lives of people who suffer from MCI, which stands for Mild Cognitive Impairment. There are certain different symptoms that affect the lives of those people, my team and I decided to focus on forgetfulness and loss of important items.
5 Steps of our Design Process:
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Empathize
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Define
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Ideation
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Prototype
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Test Results
1. Empathize
“‘Empathise’ is the first stage of the Design Thinking process. The following stages can be summarised as: Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test. In the empathise stage, your goal, as a designer, is to gain an empathic understanding of the people you’re designing for and the problem you are trying to solve.”
-Interaction Design Organization
We started by researching videos and articles online. We couldn't get in contact with anyone who had MCI, but we talked to family and friends of people who suffer from it. We first looked at the causes and at how their lives are affected. From that we used Personas to help us understand our target audience.
Personas
“Personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research in order to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way.”
-Interaction Design Foundation
2. Define
“It’s the second stage of the Design Thinking process. It’s time to State Your Users' Needs and Problems and accumulate the information gathered during the Empathize stage. You then analyze your observations and synthesize them to define the core problems you and your team have identified. These definitions are called problem statements. You can create personas to help keep your efforts human-centered before proceeding to ideation.”
-Interaction Design Organization
Mindmap
Affinity Diagram
Using research, interviews and those design methods we arrived at our Problem and Opportunity Identification: Memory related tasks. Those can entail :
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remembering appointments responsibilities, and events;
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preventing the loss of items or bolstering the finding process of lost items.
3. Ideation
“Ideation is a creative process where designers generate ideas in sessions (e.g., brainstorming, worst possible idea). It is the third stage in the Design Thinking process. Participants gather with open minds to produce as many ideas as they can to address a problem statement in a facilitated, judgment-free environment.”
-Interaction Design Organization
First draft idea: WALL-iT
Storyboard
Journey frameworks
Sketches
After deciding on designing a box to help the MCI community with their recurrent loss of important items, we realized that integrating that with home decoration would be our next step. here are some of our sketches when trying to figure out which route to follow:
4. Prototype
“This is an experimental phase. The aim is to identify the best possible solution for each problem found. Your team should produce some inexpensive, scaled-down versions of the product (or specific features found within the product) to investigate the ideas you’ve generated.”
-Interaction Design Organization
We decided to go with a clock for the exterior of our box. We figured we would design something that would go well with the decoration of someone who is above 65 (age when MCI usually starts). With that came Clockwise. And we used CAD to render our first prototype:
LED Icons on the clock face which light up when the specific object is not in the Clockwise box. This feature also helps as a reminder to the user that Clockwise isn't just a clock.
Final Video
Below is our final video made in iMovie. The video explains how Clokwise works and how to use it:
5. Test
“Try Your Solutions Out. Evaluators rigorously test the prototypes. Although this is the final phase, design thinking is iterative: Teams often use the results to redefine one or more further problems. So, you can return to previous stages to make further iterations, alterations and refinements – to find or rule out alternative solutions.”
-Interaction Design Organization
