Field Research

This is our third week of Studio 3 and we are researching topics that can help our design process and also brainstorming ideas for our project. We did some field research at a community garden just across the road from our university campus. This garden hosts a working bee multiple times a week where the community can come in to get their hands dirty and learn about gardening. Going into this working bee I wanted to learn about the overall experience and how we could translate that into our app.

We ended up digging a trench around the inside of a greenhouse to put up chicken wire to keep out pests. When nearing completion we found that it may not be the best solution for the problem because rats and still chew threw or climb over. The organisers for the working bee came up with the solution to use chilli spray to keep the pests out.

This sort of creative thinking made me realise how broad and flexible gardening can be. We were thinking of processes and systems that practitioners use that we could teach students, but practitioners use creative problem solving to ensure they have a solution for every environment and problem. Of course there are still processes that can make their work easier, but they still need to be flexible enough to be applied to many different situations. In order to make an educational app for gardening, we would need to teach everything about biology, chemistry, horticulture, agriculture, etc. But obviously we don’t have those qualifications or time so we needed a compromise.

Our client said that he wanted us to focus on recall activities through mini games, so we can assume that he doesn’t expect us to pack this much information in this app. We can also assume that these students will be learning these things in class and this app needs to ensure this information is recalled when needed through mini games. This is something we need to brainstorm on as a team since it could change our game drastically.

Overall I think this was a really productive use of our time, we were able to get a taste of the overall experience as well as smaller details that we hadn’t even considered before hand. We didn’t get to do the most varied of tasks so we do plan on going again to get a more diverse range of tasks.

After our field research we did some storyboards to get an idea of what our app might look like and how it would function. For the most part we all have similar ideas but we still needed to iterate on them so that we could take them from 50 odd sticky notes and put them on our documentation. Next week we hope to return to the working bee to get some more experience and also iterate on our storyboards and other documentation before then.