ETHNOGRAPHY

This made me want to go grab a camera and take photos of everything www.thoughtlessacts.com
I am fascinated by the way people of the world adapt to various environments, products and places without even realizing they are doing it!
The book THOUGHTLESS ACTS by Jane Fulton Suri and IDEO is funky. It is the only book of its kind I have ever seen. It captures the funny and provocative ways that people interact with the world around them.
Flicking through the photos in this book sharpened my awareness to human behaviour and major user issues very relevant to product design.
I ventured out myself to do some 'people watching'

I hope this has given you an insight into our CHANCE project. I responded to this brief rapidly and the outcome was rewarding. For me, people were at the heart of this project and I have learned alot from a design perspective about people and the world we live in.

We produced some great funky concept videos for this project which I will try and upload soon. But the project did show us that people do infact believe everything you tell them, with a few exceptions, we made the truth more obvious. For instance, putting a sign on a cash machine stating there is chance this machine will swallow you card. And no one took the chance. Interesting.

DO PEOPLE BELIEVE EVERYTHING WE TELL THEM?
We then decided to explore the way people engage with products and systems embedded in our environment.
Looking at everyday rituals that embrace the concept of chance
Everytime we post a letter we take CHANCE that it will not be delivered properly.
We focused on making this truth obvious to the public.

OUTCOME
This project was a huge success. To gain feedback we sent out an email to all the individuals who took part in it. We successfully reached our goal of making people think about their behaviour. The fact they all seen the posters of a simple jigsaw piece created a large sense of curiosity. They took the 'chance' and followed instructions properly.

How we did it?

We focused on the idea that companies, individuals and professional bodies all over the world...take the chance that members of the public will follow instructions properly.

On first enquiry was conveyed in the form of a 'Jigsaw'
We created a 'space' called the Jigsaw Corner outside the library. Hence, creating a mini community and an interactive game.We then placed individual pieces of a jigsaw puzzle in envelopes with a set of simple instructions, and hid them in random locations. The fact we adverstised the project one week before it was set up had a great impact on the project.

The chance project…
The brief : A two week rapid response project that forms 20% of my final mark for IP31001 exploring the notion of using design as a way of finding out about people and the world.

“The world is full of chance-every moment of our lives is governed by statistics, probabilities and chance. The time we wake up, the mood we are in, the weather, the times the bus arrives and the chance we will get a seat.
Yet while we are aware of chance and we can measure it, it remains intangible-it has no form, texture,colour, taste or smell.

Explore chance from a research design perspective-using product design as a mode of enquiry…”

NEW APPROACH:
Problem finding not problem solving.
We cannot observe or directly measure chance.
Propose playfulness….make people think.
DESIGN AS A MODE OF ENQUIRY.
What is a product? It does not necessarily have to be an object…it can be an outcome.

Definition of CHANCE:
The quality shared by random, unintended, or unpredictable events.
“It is by ‘chance’ we met, by choice we became friends”
All human actions have one or more of these seven causes;
Chance,nature, compulsions, habit,reason, passion and desire.
Made me think about SERENDIPITY: is love fate, random chance, or the result of devotion and dedication…?
LUCK: the only thing about luck is that you can be sure it will change.

I worked on this brief with fellow ipd student Giorgio Giove

Our main aim of the project was to create solutions that proposed playfulness and made people think about their behaviour...

At the very outset we decided to carry our variprojectsi' projects and social experiments as opposed to focusing on one specific final outcome.