An initial meeting with Steve was held at his home, to learn about his daily life and develop an idea for an electronic device that would help him complete daily tasks more effectively. The solution can take any form but will be specifically tailored for his needs.
Prior to our meeting with Steve, we spent a lot of time crafting particular questions and activities that would enhance our ability to better understand his needs and expectations for the project. Our goal was to observe the context of his living environment, and uncover factors of his daily routine that may benefit from an assistive device. Below is our agenda with Steve:
Touchstone tour + home visit (15-20 min)
Flexible Modeling (15 min)
We would like to hear your idea and combine it with the observations we just heard
Photographs from Buggy, and Chess Score Sheet.
Steve earned his Metallurgy degree from CMU. He was an avid buggy builder and racer in his days at CMU, and he shared some of his old buggy racing photos with us. Steve is in his upper 60s and is currently working once a week for a furnace company which focuses on building large scale furnaces for industrial metal working. Work has kept him busy through life. After retirement, Steve remains active through playing and teaching chess, and traveling for work. Steve was a cross country runner at CMU, and still wants to remain physically active. He likes to walk many places and spend time on the treadmill at the JCC.
We learned that Steve wants to keep an alert mind and does this by reading, playing chess, teaching at the JCC, and interacting with others. If he isn’t doing any of those activities, he can be found working or watching old TV shows. He especially likes Hawaii Five-0 and CSI style shows.
We also observed that his current solution ideas focus on learning and decreasing small frustrations or inconveniences in his life. One his greatest inconveniences is his disorganization, causing him to lose things.
Through our discussion, we uncovered three potential ideas to help Steve:
Overall the conversation was very amiable, although he was hesitant to participate in the design actives we prepared. Also, it felt like the invitation to participate in the project stretched him a little bit.
Chess Set Given at Retirement.
The idea of exploring potential areas of assistance not only opened up Steve to providing more context to his day, but also highlighted the process of various activities and actions he takes. By the end of our discussion he had opened up and we began talking about about staying in contact to test our prototypes with him, at his convenience.
Overall, the meeting was very positive and Steve was excited to meet with us and work with us in the coming weeks. We are still in the process of synthesizing our interview into a specific direction. This is fine, but due to the difficulty of uncovering more specifics around the daily processes Steve makes, we will need to continue to develop the conversation with him to make sure our ideating truly meets his needs.
We strayed from our meeting plan to suite the comfort of Steve. During the interview, Steve was initially hesitant to participating in the planned activities. However, casual conversation with intended design questions in mind enhanced our ability to understand more about Steve and the things he struggles with daily. We feel that framing our intentions to Steve before the actual meeting would have given us better participation. Also, having more potential ideas on hand to meet his needs could have been more effective than just the three we brought. It was effective to provide natural conversation and a strong framework to encourage people to participate in an activity outside of their comfort zone in order to uncover more.
Meeting Steve in his home was valuable to understand his environment and the things that he values. In future meetings we may meet him at other locations around Pittsburgh that are familiar to Steve to observe other potential environments where we could make an positive impact.
So far, each of us had a slightly different insights and take aways from our meeting. We do not know what we are going to prototype yet, as we need to research the implementation options for the initial ideas. Over the next week we are looking forward to discussing, affinity mapping, and analyzing our next steps.
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