phase 1:
Concept exploration & development
February 4-26, 2003

weekly update

week 07

Phase 1 Presentation for Microsoft (A2):
We spent this week refining our three product concepts for Wednesday’s presentation to Debbie from the Microsoft Office Division. While discussing the most important aspects of each idea, we realized that one new concept embraced the values represented in most of our preliminary sketches. Voting between a progressive children’s camera, a digital scrapbook and a travel companion that saved memories proved extremely fruitful. We decided to pursue the travel companion that could assist in creating a shared community during vacations while still maintaining an individual memory for a particular traveler. The next few steps will include more brainstorming and defining a target user group.

week 06

Scenarios of Use:
A few more ideas bubbled to the surface out of our scenarios of use discussions, including a device for use by tourists which provides hybrid functionality of the memory saver, a camera, and a smart card.

Selecting Three Concepts:
Using our favorite themes as inspiration, we narrowed in on three main concepts for which we would present for the end of A2. The group selected a Digital Memory Saver, a Progressive Children's Camera, and a Smart Card.

Sketching Around Themes of Consensus:
Voting on the most interesting themes and values out of the brainstorming sessions helped funnel the team's next round of sketches. There was a significant amount of consensus around the themes: collections, cradle-to-cradle, personal identity, and making content precious.

week 05

Values and Themes Brainstorm:
During this session, we evaluated the values and themes we believed to be integral to our team’s design.

Drawing Relationships between Ideas:
Through this analysis, we established five interrelated sections that pertained to commerce, play, narrative, collection, and services.

Combining Sketches with Post-its:
After a thorough discussion of our options, we posted our concept sketches within our affinity diagram to better assist us in seeing what opportunities had already been pursued.

Prioritizing our Objective:
Instead of perpetuating this scale of brainstorming, we agreed to each select five values/themes and then use these attributes to formulate a more defined objective.

week 04

Discussion of “Shared Personal Media”:
To gain a greater understanding and develop a common appreciation for this design challenge, our group began this process by identifying what we thought was “Shared Personal Media.”

From this compendium, we researched potential user groups and themes in order to develop initial sketches based upon our brainstorming session.

Initial Concept Sketches:
Each team member generated 5-10 concept sketches based upon specific user groups and themes relative to shared media.

phase 1 documents

week 07

feb 26

Phase 1 Presentation for Microsoft (4.1 MB)
Phase 1 process: concept development & exploration PowerPoint presentation

week 06

feb 21

Three Concept Presentation (88 KB )
A PowerPoint presentation that documents our three concept ideas

feb 18

Refined Sketches (4.4 MB)
Iterations of our product sketches, still with heavy individual focus and form, but anchored back to our themes of consensus.

week 05

feb 14

Status Report (68 KB)
Information about Brainstorms, theme and idea development.

feb 12

Interactive Process Overview (3.4 MB)
Flash piece that describes our process during the product development phase.

feb 12

30 0riginal Ideas (3 MB)
Flash piece that showcases our 30 original product ideas.

week 04

feb 03

What is Personal Media? (32 KB)
A list of results from our "What is Personal Media" brainstorm.

feb 03

Initial Concept Sketches (1 MB)
The initial product sketches from our individual product ideas.