Discovery is the root of good design. You will be observing another Stanford student using her or his mobile phone "in the wild" to discover opportunities for design innovation.
By observation of a single carefully selected individual, you will create a comprehensive picture of the practice of using mobile phones during a specific activity – e.g., completing morning errands, attending a party, going out to dinner. This approach to discovery is called contextual inquiry. (Contextual inquiry is typically performed with a small population of 5-10 representative individuals, but in the interest of time you only need to observe one person.) The method of contextual inquiry was covered in class lecture on Thursday, September 27. After your observation is complete, you will distill your findings into specific needs: opportunities for design innovation that would allow mobile phones to better support the activity you observed. These needs will be used to fuel ideas for your group projects.
Begin by selecting a specific activity to observe, and form a distinct plan for making observations. Your plan should include setting goals, deciding on methods, and creating templates for recording observations. You will want to observe the successes, breakdowns, and latent opportunities that occur when mobile phones are used to support (or go unused during) your chosen activity.
Next, select an individual to observe. Choose someone who is not similar to yourself, e.g. a friend with a different major. Ask that person to participate in this assignment and get permission. Plan to follow that friend for 1 hour, observing her or him during the selected activity. Be sure you coordinate with your participant to select a time that will be rich for observations.
During the observation, in addition to taking notes using your prepared templates, use digital photographs to document your friend's activities. Do not use a video camera. After the 1 hour of observations, spend 15 to 30 minutes interviewing him or her about the mobile phone use that you observed. It should take you approximately 1 hour of time to make observations if you have planned carefully. It will take you longer if you haven’t planned carefully!
Once your observation is completed, prepare a summary of your method and results. Your write up should include:
In the next two assignments, you will begin the design of a product or service that will meet some of the needs you have identified here. Final group project topics will be selected from the ideas that come out of assignments 2 &ndash 4.
Your summary will be submitted online as a body of plain text and a series of digital photograph attachments. Do not spend time "beautifying" your summary.
The submission website can be accessed through the course website with your SUNet login.
To submit the assignment, log in to this website and click the Submit Assignment link in the Current Assignment box. On the submission page you can enter the writeup as well as upload any number of images. Clicking the "Save" button will save the current version of your writeup. Your latest save will automatically be submitted for grading when the assignment is due. You can save as many times as you need until the deadline (11am Thursday).
Submit early! The system is not design to handle everyone submitting at 10:55am on Thursday! Late assignments will not be accepted!
Be prepared to informally present the needs you identified (3 minutes maximum). You should not prepare slides or other visuals for this presentation – we will have a projector set up that will allow you to easily present the digital photographs you submitted with your assignment.
The assignment was graded out of 75 points. The points were broken down as follows: