Creating the Education Kitchen kit Prototype
This is when our team really shined. Laura, Mackenize, Maria and I went full-on to design a prototype for our presentation last week. Laura especially took ownership designing the look and feel of Education Kitchen. I helped to guide and tweak a few things with the type and colors but Laura really deserves praise for the visual design. Our Slack group chat blew up for hours and it was a great feeling.
I think in terms of strengths, we complemented each other well and I appreciated how when it came to meeting deadlines and time to discuss direction, we showed up and we followed through. Forming these types of relationships is one of the great things about graduate study and immersive experiences; one I believe can be harder with online educational experiences.
Mackenzie also went to town on building a more detailed scenario for our presentation. I love the combined imagery/collage type effect. She has a knack for building and making.
For this phase, I suppose Maria and I took on supportive roles; making sure that our presentation had all the right elements; filling in where we were needed in terms of gathering , organizing and structuring content, checking spelling. plus making sure there was consistency in the language, content, design, presentation, among various other tasks.
All in all, we were at team in every sense of the word.
Effective functional and cross-functional teams do more than “divide and conquer” when confronting the never-ending queue; they harness that sparky, sometimes chaotic, energies of their members in a collaborative effort that we’ll call “thought partnership”.
You can think of a thought partner as an intellectual complement—a collaborator who shares your goals but comes at problems from a different angle, with a different set of skills.
“Creative Teamwork”, p. 146, Chapter 6,, About Face)
Maria, Mackenzie and Laura were my “thought partners” in every sense of the word. I feel fortunate and hope we’ll work together on many more projects in the future. I will add that anyone who hires them in the future will reap rewards.
Kit Mockups and AR Prototype
Here is Education Kitchen and a few examples of items that would be included in the kit.
Initial Feedback
Overall, Education Kitchen was well-received. Ideally we would have been able to connect with at least one of our stakeholders to present and offer them a chance to give us feedback directly as well as use the AR app prototype. In the near future, we hope to accomplish this after implementing additional feedback we received.
In addition to the previous suggestion to try BlippAR to create a working app, a suggestion to add illustrations to the recipe pages so that kids can also color those pages was offered. Perhaps while an adult in the house cooks, the kid can color. We received some nice compliments on the presentation and visual direction. Additional feedback included discussion about community gardens and how in underserved populations, land is at a premium with many most likely living in apartment complexes. This would shift the community garden to the schools but even then, land might not be available. Roger Horne spoke about this aspect and why he doesn’t see “community gardens” as a solution. Community gardens are not part of our solution but Clay’s point is a good one. Perhaps we need to include something about gardening in containers or hydroponics? A growing solution that doesn’t require land.
There were also suggestions about having a dinner party where the food from the kids’ community garden would be served … This is an idea we had as well but for development, raising funds to support non-profits or even schools; a way to bring the families, farmers, educators and officials together.
More and more, this leads me to think our pitch or messaging needs to be more clear that we are not advocating for a community garden or that kids encourage their families to start a garden. Perhaps the inclusion of seeds automatically suggests this. I think of the seeds as more of a science experiment opportunity.
On the tech side (AR), Clay spoke about “unlockable items” which triggered a memory that Lien also spoke about unlocking experiences. Perhaps we didn’t speak clearly enough about how the technology is a bonus layer. So, IF schools have access to wifi and a device that could support AR apps, then the students benefit from this feature. Still, he did encourage us to think about how the AR aspects could be more than nutrition information; something really special and I think this is where he was saying it could tie into a website layer as well; an opportunity to educate at a global scale from a local level. His ideas for a journal or “pen pal” concept was interesting and one to seriously consider moving forward.
Good feedback and more things to think about and re-process if we decide to move even further with this draft of a solution for the next iteration!
Stylistically, this isn’t a match but it was a good suggestion and we’ll need to address this in future iterations.
Moving Forward
I would be keen on developing this concept further and some aspects I’d like to address in a future iteration include:
- Understanding what visuals—color, typography, illustration style—and even paper feel would appeal to our target audience. While I love the current look and feel, it may not resonate with our core audience. I’ve made a mental note to remember that as designers we come with our own ideas and personal tastes that may not always align with others. More research definitely needs to be done.
- Present our working prototype to Urban Greenworks and Urban Oasis to get their impressions.
- Create a more detailed “map” of how a more personalized regional approach would work and what types of items would be included (e.g. Maine vs. Texas).
- Think in more detail about postures for mobile devices. The prototype we created was for an iPhone. How different would the experience be on a tablet and on different operating systems? How would the experiences differ in the classroom versus outside the classroom? For example, if we created a prototype for a farmer who invites kids to the farm, how would the AR experience—assuming she/he has the tech resources—be different?
- Explore the idea of a website where people could archive into a journal or create postcards to send to other Education Kitchen explorers.
- Understand AR technology more and further develop the narrative of its use and inclusion in the kit. This is where “understanding technology” (Don Norman) is truly critical.
Adding more digital experiences would definitely require us to think more about addressing beginner users and experts plus get a better understanding of possible friction points. In fact, writing about this experience leads me to think we definitely would need to explore the AR app more closely from a user’s point-of-view. I don’t think we did enough analysis and testing.
Ah, lessons learned … I think it’ll take a while longer to process everything. I’m sure in the next few days and weeks, I’ll realize more we could do to refine and improve our first iteration. As a person who isn’t used to slamming through my work, I’m adjusting. Still, the lessons and takeaways will definitely be applied in future projects for this class as well as others.
Timeline for prototype build and presentation: Less than a week.
This is Part 9 in a series documenting my learning experiences developing a solution to address food deserts, food security, health literacy, and health for populations. This project is part of our Designing Innovation course with Professor Lien Tran at the University of Miami, School of Communication. I am an IMFA (Interactive Media Master of Fine Arts) candidate.
