Table of Contents
Introduction
Video recording
This video is a workshop which covers two perspectives on co-design. We recommend that you first go through the video. Afterwards you can rely on this article, it’s based on the video’s best practices.
Article
- Workshop duration: 2 hours, you need one hour to complete the process once.
- Participant pairs of people who don’t know each other too well works best for the assignments.
- Goal of the workshop: at the end you are going to give your partner a present. And it’s going to be the best present that person has ever received
- We are going to go through a number of steps in very strict time schedule.
Required material
If there are visual impaired participants, start with providing preparation time to allow them to find a place where they can work and organise the following materials efficiently:
- A clock or a timer
- Something to protect the working area
- A set of wire core wrapped in soft fibres that are flexible and bendable (also known as pipe cleaners or twister sticks)
- Stick-on material with a variety of shapes and thicknesses
- Modelling compound
- Cardboard
- Scissors
- Paper
- Adhesives such as glue sticks, double sided adhesive dots, and poster putty. Avoid tape, it gets entangled when you don’t see where it is.
There is a bit of research on designing together with visual impaired, but in our experience the documented techniques are not yet as extensively explored compared to techniques which rely on vision. Therefor feel free to experiment by offering whichever material you have.
Let's start the workshop
Don’t think yet about the gift you have to give. That gift will appear naturally.
Here are some tips:
- Have faith in your experience to inform your design choices.
- Be explicit about what you are currently doing.
- Express your opinions directly instead of easily agreeing.
- Don’t give up trying to explain your ideas to visual impaired participants
- Interview
We will start with the following. One person is the interviewer, the other is the interviewee. You can reverse the roles later.
Don’t ask the interviewee which gift he wants to get. Because this person himself doesn’t know what gift this one wants. You just ask very general things. For example:
- Who are you?
- What do you do?
- What are you involved in?
- What do you do in your spare time?
You are not looking for a gift. Just try to get to know your interviewee a little.
Time available: 2 minutes.
- Keep asking
You probably had a pleasant conversation. Now you are continuously thinking about the gift. Don’t.
Based on the conversation, try to focus on one aspect that caught your attention. Not related to a gift. For example, what you noticed a lot of enthusiasm about. Try to find out why that interested them so much.
Time available: 2 minutes.
Problem analysis: discover needs
Now that you are getting to know the interviewee so well, it can be difficult to interrupt the conversation, but we are going to do that anyway.
The following steps are just for the interviewer. Start thinking about what you heard.
- Filter what you heard
- Write down as keywords needs or desires, things they are trying to do or would like to do.
- Insights: what have you discovered that the interviewee may not have realised themselves? Draw conclusions from what you heard, make lconnections. For example, between feelings and their worldview.
Time available: 3 minutes
- Formulate the discovered need
In one sentence, try to define your interviewee’s needs, desires and insights:
Name would like need because/want/but insight.
Time available: 2 minutes
- Ask your interviewee how they feel about this formulation.
Time available: 3 minutes
- If this formulation does not feel right, then reformulate it together.
Time available: maximum 5 minutes
Idea generation: think of alternatives
Based on this need, you will work together on a solution.
- Each of you will write down 5 names of a variety of television characters such as superheroes, or a variety of jobs. Combining them is all right! Next to each name, describe how the character would solve or fulfil the need of the interviewee, described in the previous step. Do this by yourselves.
Time available: 8 minutes
- Share your ideas and listen to the reaction
Share your ideas. You will each get two minutes for this. Interviewer, pay attention to the interviewee’s reactions when they explain their own ideas and gives an opinion on your ideas.
Time available: 2 times 2 minutes
Idea selection: adapt based on the feedback
- Together, you reflect and come up with a new solution. Describe your idea and write down details.
Based on the feedback, you will combine the positive elements of the ideas into something new.
Time available: 4 minutes
Idea communication: build and test
- Communicate your ideas, part one!
Is and is not: Write down the words ‘is’ and ‘is not’. Together underneath ‘is’ you will list up a description of the gift. Now do the same for ‘is not’. This part helps you to make things clear and avoid misunderstandings.
Time available: 5 minutes
- Communicate your ideas, part two!
Storyboard: Together write a short story that presents the use or added value of the gift. Write from the perspective of the person being interviewed and the environment of use. What happens before, during and after using it?
Time available: 5 minutes
- Make the gift
The interviewer makes a physical version of the gift! The interviewee leaves the room for 10 minutes.
Time available: 10 minutes
- Give your gift and listen to the reaction
- What worked?
- What could be better?
- Questions?
- Ideas?
Time available: 5 minutes
Conclusion
In about an hour, we went through the co-design process. The important thing about this story is that you can also apply this process to challenges related to customising and designing assistive devices.
You may not have found the ultimate gift. You undoubtedly made something that the interviewee appreciated in some way. What led to it is that we worked in stages.
Imagine if you were tasked with “talk to each other and come up with a solution”, that probably wasn’t going to go smoothly.
You designed something thanks to the different stages where you first listened to each other, gained insights, came up with ideas, then selected ideas and then designed something together.
Interested in the science behind the workshop?
An assistive device which does not meet an individuals needs results in less or no use of the assistive device and a decrease in the quality of life. Often this is the result of not including the product end-users, also known as the target group, during the design process.
Co-design is a collaborative approach where product end-users, also known as the target group, work with designers to create solutions for their needs. The majority of theory on effective co-design doesn’t take into account the abilities of people with a visual impairment.
With this workshop we give an introduction to effective product design.
So, what’s the process you’ve done during the workshop?
- In the first part, you open up our thinking: You collect lots of information, and look at the situation from different points of view. Then you narrow your focus and decide what the real problem is that needs to be solved.
- In the second part, you again open up your thinking. You come up with many different ideas and possible solutions. After that, you narrow your focus again and choose the solution that works best.
This is often referred to as “the double diamond”. It’s visualised as two rectangles placed next to eachother, angled 90 degrees, overlapping and connected. This gives the look of two diamonds.
In 2021 Barkins’ investigated how to create an inclusive and accessible environment for sketching and ideating for blind and low-vision designers. The four tips shared at the beginning of the workshop came from the feedback shared by his participants. Also, a part of the material list was inspired by his article.
Barkins D. Accessible Design: Exploring the Ideation and Sketching Process with Blind/Low-Vision Individuals (2021)
Additional material
Perhaps you have pairs within this workshop who want to use a visual idea generating technique. This enables the method of sketching, rather than doing both written idea communication techniques. We suggest that you pay attention to the following:
- Have pens with a varied tip thickness available. Only use pens with a tip thickness that creates a line thick enough to view comfortably at reading distance. This has to be checked with the participants.
- Make sure that there is paper available which has a good contrast with the offered pens.
- Non-colourblind people often use colour to differentiate. Pay attention that other traits than colour are used, for example by using a variety of dashed lines.
