A media toolbox for ideation workshops. Daniel Saakes ID-Studiolab Delft University of Technology Landbergstraat 15 2628CE Delft NL [email protected] +31 6 48189008 ABSTRACT

company.

We present our explorations of a media toolbox aimed at ideation workshops at the early stage of designing consumer products.

In regular design meetings designers make fluid and extensive use of sketching as well as building small prototypes. Here participants actively contribute and explore the solution space by doing first [6]: building foam and paper prototypes and playing interactions.

The toolbox immerses participants in their generated material and hereby we create a visual rich shared memory that aims to keep the generated materials alive during and after the workshop. The aim of the toolbox is to support participants in a doing first, unmediated creative process.

This is in contrast to the processes of stakeholders in creative workshops sessions. Even though the stakeholders actively participate and contribute to design solutions, their input is primary in oral or written language. Involving facilitators and visualizers makes it an efficient multistakeholder process, but it also means that such meetings do not fully support the intuitive, doing-first types of exploration of the solution space. Ward et al [9] argue that such an generate- and explore cycle- provide a better fit to the human creative process better than the alternate diverging and converging phases in creative problem solving meetings.

Author Keywords

Drawing, Tangible User Interface, Creative Group Session, Design Process ACM Classification Keywords

H5.1 Artificial, augmented and virtual realities H5.2 Prototyping H5.3 collaborative computing. INTRODUCTION

Consumer products are oftentimes designed by multidisciplinary teams, involving stakeholders from marketing, information technology, usability, and engineering. Creative group sessions and workshops are commonly applied to generate new ideas and facilitate collaboration in the early creative phases of the design process. The workshops not only provide new product ideas, they also help the various stakeholders to establish a shared understanding of the task at hand [3].

Involving the stakeholders in the ideation process has strong parallels to the ways in which in co-design users are brought into the design process. They are all involved in design-like activities without having prior education in design. Sanders and William [8] tackle this issue by providing users with generative-toolkits, ambiguous visual stimuli that enables users to express thoughts, feelings, dreams and new ideas. The new media, such as blogs, youtube, wikipedia, enable people to actively participate and contribute without explicit mediation of a professional. The following qualities are characteristic for the new media:

These creative workshops contain cycles of generating and exploring. Upon exploring the problem, rough ideas and themes are developed into concepts. Facilitators steer this process, using flipcharts and whiteboards for note-making. Sometimes, visualizers are involved who translate written or verbalized ideas into idea sketches [5]. Such visualizations aid the shared visual memory of the group [4], and they help communicate the session results to the

1) Collaboration: the media is specifically aimed at groups of people. 2) Decentralized: there are no levels; all members participate without being mediated by a third party, such as a facilitator as focus of attention 3) Interactive: the media facilitate two-way communication. Media tools and techniques make use of the new media to support collaborative activities. Our basic assumption is that by applying new media tools in creative group processes, these qualities enable all stakeholders to fully engage in a fluent creative process. But then we need a fourth quality: 1

4) Digital Physical Transition. The media is open, tangible and accessible for groups, not confined to a computer screen or laptop.

by the design team in the design activities following the workshop.

THE TOOLBOX

Our explorations of a media toolbox are situated in packaging industry. In intense multi-disciplinary two-day workshops, new product ideas are developed for commodity products such as washing powder, potato chips and toothpaste. The packages often consist of containers of carton or of inexpensive plastics and shrink-wrap foils with printed graphics in order to make the product appealing. Typically, these ideation workshops have about twenty participants, whose expertise ranges from packaging design, product engineering to marketing research and usability testing. A design group facilitates such workshops for various product divisions. The group consists of designers, visualizers and facilitators. We approached the study by using our current tools as a starting point and refining their use over the course of a series of workshops. Starting with existing tools allowed us to learn substantially with a minimum of time spent on developing prototypes. All visual materials created by the participants, ranging from ideas on post-it notes to drawings and photos of prototypes, were real-time digitized using cameras and stored in a digital collective memory. This collective memory was then projected on large wall displays, using the cabinet software to spatially group, store and display visual materials [2]. We provided access to the collective memory in three ways:

Figure 1. Reviewing and organising of photographed concepts on a large shared display. The participants made their packaging concepts through physical modelling with paper and foam; similar to the generative toolkits of Sanders [8]. We provided existing packages and various tinkering shapes that could be easily glued together.

1) Throughout the workshops we immersed the participants in a slow-pace slideshow of images. The slideshow mixed inspirational images and materials of the collective memory in a ludic way [1]. The slideshow provided ambient access to the generated materials with the aim of keeping the generated materials alive during the session. Especially the photos taken of participants engaged in activities helped them to remember and build on earlier generated ideas. 2) During the review phases the wall projection provided a way to group the materials spatially accessible to all participants and thereby provided a cognitive access to the materials. 3) During concept exploration, the participants were grouped into smaller teams. They had access to all digitized materials of the previous rounds, using the cabinet software on their laptops. These teams created ‘rich digital summaries’ of their concepts, showing the concepts in relation to the ideas, moodboards and other visual material. Subsequently in the review session the summaries were merged into the collection and the teams presented their designs to each other on the large display. The summaries, created by the participants, were seen as the rich documentation of the outcomes of the workshop, to be used

Figure 2. Prepared tinkering shapes. The designs were “painted” using Skin [7]; an augmented modelling technique to explore colors, patterns and graphics on physical shapes. As shown in Figure 3; Skin consists of a projector mounted on a table that projects computer generated images. Skin has two modes of visualising graphics. 1) Browsing through collections of inspirational images to facilitate exploratory creativity [9]. Viewing images on physical shape can trigger unexpected new combinations and ideas. Skin contains a collection of inspirational images, consisting both of patterns such as leopard skins

DISCUSSION

and pictures of music albums and for instance tropical locations.

Our initial assumptions regarding unmediated participation were confirmed by the lively and playful collaboration, both from observations and from the reactions of the participants in the evaluations afterwards.

2) To facilitate the goal-oriented creativity [9] we provided ways to compose and layer artwork. With the video camera brand specific graphics such as logos, but also fruit and vegetables and other found materials could be layered a over the digital collection in order to create a new potato chips theme or a healthy yoghurt. For this we supplied cutout graphics printed on carton. Concepts made on Skin were captured using a digital camera and stored in the collective memory.

In the evaluations the participants emphasised how they felt more active and engaged compared to their prior workshops. Also efficiency increases were mentioned, they felt they no longer depended on the writing speed of the facilitator or the drawing speed of the visualizers. They also preferred the rich visual summaries to the written texts on post-it notes.

Figure 3. Skin. A projector is mounted on a table and projects computer generated graphics onto prototypes of packages.

Figure 9. Participants collaborating and interacting with Skin. Using Skin, we observed participants lively generating, exploring and discussing various designs. “At first I had the same comments as IT (the information technology group to whom we showed the tools during a break): with Photoshop I can do the same. But it is really helping me when we are building concepts. It helps me being active and it becomes a team effort.” A participant from marketing. “If we are doing powder cartons or something, some of the other big workshops we have done were you might have 50 or 60 concepts and there are quick to prototype and instead of finding coloured material logos you could make white prototypes and then have some stock logos maybe some mountains or something and build yourself a little graphic and project it on.” a P&G visualizer reflecting on Skin. We also observed participants actively looking in their surrounding for patterns and browsed magazines for materials. They also created artwork with markers and pencils, composed collages and explored the graphics on their concepts. As we expected, the physical composing of artwork made the activity fit to the tinkering with physical prototypes.

Figure 5. Physical materials and cut-out brand specific graphics can be grabbed with a camera and mixed with the digital image collection.

However, we expected that Skin would generate new concepts and new ideas, in a doing-first way. But the tool 3

was used solely for the presentations, in order to beautify concepts. Concepts conceived as ideas in rough drawings, were subsequently physically prototyped before they applied graphics with Skin. We had hoped that the activity of physical prototyping and exploring graphics on Skin itself would lead to new ideas. On the one hand, our implicit assumption that building shapes and exploring graphics would be a continuous process might prove wrong. On the other hand we might have to revise the workshop process in order to see the tool be used to its full extend. In our explorations we have applied our current tools, mostly aimed at individual designers, in collaborative ideation workshops. By applying the tools, the dynamics and structure of the workshop inevitable has to co-evolve. Also, with a decentralized idea generation, the roles of the visualizers and facilitators are likely to change. The visualizers are likely to become media facilitators that drive the moodboards and visually document the participants’ activities. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors wish to thank Procter & Gamble and the Brussels Cre8Innov8 team for their collaboration in the study, and providing financial support. Especially Tanya van Rompuy, Heidi, Jamie and Chris for their valuable insights throughout this study. Thanks to Pieter Jan Stappers, Casper Koomen and Aadjan van der Helm for their participation and facilitation. REFERENCES

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