Week 8 Further development on design brief

MILESTONE:

Due to our continuously changing design concepts I decided to investigate what the brief should contain and how we could develop our design more efficiently. I identified that there is going to be a hierarchy between requirements and user needs and this should be explored and mapped out at a later stage.I also developed a few 'how to' statements about the needs of the users as shown at the end of this blog. This lead to a design statement aimed at guiding our further design.

When Can You Make a Design Specification?

Normally, a design specification is constructed during the problem analysis, the result being some finished list of requirements. However, a design specification is never really complete. During a design project, even during the conceptual designing stages, new requirements are frequently found because of some new perspective on the design problem. Therefore, a design specification should be constantly updated and changed.
 
Possible procedure

List as many requirements as possible. Roozenburg and Eekels state that to arrive at a complete design specification, different points of view can be taken into account. Choose one, or several, of these points of views (stakeholders, aspects, or process tree) to help generate requirements. You can also use a checklist, for example by Pugh.
Make a distinction between hard and soft requirements (between hard requirements, which are quantifiable, and wishes).
Eliminate requirements which are in fact similar or who do not discrimate between design alternatives.
Identify whether there is a hierarchy between requirements. Divide between lower-level and higher-level require ments.
Operationalize requirements: determine the variables of requirements in terms of observable or quantifiable characteristics.
Make sure that the programme of requirements fulfills the following conditions:
Each requirement must be valid.
The set of requirements must be as complete as possible.
The requirements must be operational.
The set of requirements must be non-redundant.
That the set of requirements must be concise.
The requirements must be practicable.

Tips and concerns

Be careful: do not make the possibilities for your design too limited by defining too many requirements.

Distinguish between measurable requirements and non-measurable requirements.
Give your requirements numbers in order to be able to refer to them.

http://www.wikid.eu/index.php/How_to%27s :

What Are How To's?

Figure 1: Example of H2's
‘How to’s’ (see figure 1) are problem statements written in the form of “How to…” (How to’s are often written as H2 for short). Examples are: H---ow to carry luggage in the airport? How to transport deep-frozen food in a shop? How to supply people with beverages at a festival?

The “How to..” way of phrasing is dynamic and inviting. The idea is to create a wide variety of problem descriptions. In this way different perspectives are briefly shown, and the problem is described from these different points of view. There are rules in force such as ‘postpone judgment’, ‘associate on the ideas of others’ and ’strive for quantity rather than quality’. The How to’s are open questions that stimulate your creativity almost immediately. The various “how to” questions give a comprehensive overview of the problem that you are working on.


Here is my interpretation:
There is an increasing need for connecting to other people you care about, however often this interaction is restricted or limited through physical distances, time constraint and differences and an increasingly independent and busy lifestyle.

How to's:
- How to connect to loved ones through a tangible interaction?
- How can users communicate and feel social presence through an external aid?
- How can two or more people be connected through a convenient interaction complementing instead of limiting the participants lifestyle?
- How can people communicate and get fundamental needs covered without physically being in the same location?
- How can an external aid encourage and promote real time interaction without loosing vital elements and cause confusion and frustration?
- How can a new design cover a broad range of needs in a more efficient and better way than any existing media or social network?

Common elements:
- Connectivity
- Function efficiently across a distance
- Cover fundamental needs of communication and feeling togetherness
- Promote real time interaction in a better way than existing media

End statement:
- Designing an object that promotes socializing through real time, tangible interactions between people, regardless of physical and limiting conditions.