User Personas...part IV

Our last and most interesting user persona is Richard. He's a 55-year-old architect who's a Berkeley graduate. He worked for a San Luis Obispo architecture firm. After a severe car accident, however, he lost his hand and was severely injured, which put him out of work for a while. He lost his ability to draft, as that was the means of doing business in his time, and didn't know how to use a computer. As time passed, the new incoming architects were digitally proficient, something richard couldn't compete with. He had massive debt, due to the hospital bills and can't get a job due to his status. He also has no family to go to. He's an extremely intelligent individual who enjoys puzzles and problem solving. He spends his time reading and tries to learn as much as possible from everything. He is extremely friendly with the locals but talks excessively. A rather depressing story...

User Personas...part III

Our 3rd user persona was Coco Banernaut. She's a 30-year-old lawyer who's pregnant and has 1 kid. She has a husband, but he's almost never there, being caught up in work (he's a doctor); therefore she's the main caretaker of the child. She has the desire to relive her college past. She was actually a Cal Poly student, but decided to stay and live here. Her one and only child has A.D.D. Coco is a funny person who, through her pregnancy, is very emotional. She is a formal, classy woman who works hard and just tries to relax in the little spare time she has.

User Personas....part II

Today we met at the library. We developed the rest of our user personas.

Our first was a 20 year-old college student named Ashley. Her major is computer science. She is studious, curious, introverted, a broke college kid, and has the desire to be social. She enjoyes interaction with others but is too timid to initiate conversations. She works for Resnet and is a TA, and enjoys video games; therefore, she is not the most popular girl around.


Here's a few pics of today.

User personas...part I

So we kinda ran out of time towards the end of class, and we were only able to develop one user persona. We're meeting tomorrow to develop the other two and to work on our design. For the mean time, here's our 12-year-old preteen with an attitude Timmy. He's a typical class clown who loves attention. He has a short memory span and loves to push the limits to convey a bad-boy persona. Oh, and he plays hockey. Here are a few renditions of our interpretation of him.

Wednesday May 4th

So today we pretty much just worked towards further developing our project. We discussed our survey results and how we could translate those into our design approach.

We discussed overall form and activities that would occur within our exhibit. I think our group made significant progress today as we were able to derive an overall layout and design for our exhibit. Now it's just a matter of running with that and further developing it.

Here's a few pictures...

Monday May 2nd, Class Update

We made a lot of progress during this class. Starting off with giving group feedback on how we could work better together. Everyone rated our teams performance at about a five, because we have made a lot of progress in working together progressing on our project but there is still room for improvement.This was our list of thinks to start doing, stop doing, and continue doing.

Start:
- Making Decisions
- Clarifying Idea 
- Compromising/ Give a little, Take a little 

Stop:
- Wasting time
- Getting stuck on one idea or detail and not being able to move on

Continue:
- Listening to everyone's ideas 
- Drawings: They convey all of our ideas more clearly then just telling each other

We did make progress on the project through making a few decisions that we are continuing with right now but can be changed if need be. The First is that we decided on the tilted L design with linear inlets to create public and private interaction areas but a slight curve of the entire structure. We decided we wanted to have a window type portion where people could see how turbines work underwater. We plan to have the highest point be four feet tall unless we have a free standing open mechanism then we will make an exception of no more then 5 feet tall. We would like to elongate our design because we believe it will flow with the water and area better.  We plan to have grates and filters to account for any unwanted items that might fall into or be placed into our exhibit. We are considering a roof over the area but have not yet decided if we are going to follow through with it because we do not want to interfere with the atmosphere of the space.

We decided out 10 questions to ask the general public in order to get a better view of how people would view/approach hydro-power and our exhibit.The questions and our collected responses are below.

*On A scale from 1 to 5 how important do you think renewable energy is?

One person said 3

Four people said 4

Seven people said 5 

*On a scale from 1 to 5 what do you think is the influence of renewable energy in your daily life?

Two people said 1

Nine people said 2

Three people said 3

 

*When you hear the term hydropower what comes to mind? 

*Turbines in water

* A Dam (Hoover)

*Water Powering objects

*Environmental Destruction

*Water Turbines

*Dying Fish, not good, Interfere with lifecycle

*Rivers

*Reservoirs

 

*What can you tell me about hydropower?

*Harnessing natural water for energy.

*Countryside water wheel

*Dams are bad for the environment

*Destruction of Dam placement.

*Energy harnessed through a water current

*Uses of a water wheel by a stream

*Originally good idea before, steam engines, but a better way to go at it now

*Not efficient

*Turbines

*Converting Mechanics into energy 

*What concerns do you have with Hydropower?

*Dams can disrupt the environment and destroy ecosystems

*Not enough modern advances in hydro power technology

*Destruction, Migration Patterns, Erosion, use of nonrenewable energy to construct dams, 60 year life span of the Dams

*Dam destructs the environment and a large scale back up of water

*Focus is on Renewable Energy when there are bigger problems in the world

 *Have you ever been to a water exhibit? If yes, elaborate

*Lots of Natural responses. They considered waterfalls, ponds, oceans, and lakes exhibits. Shows where most people have experienced informal learning about water

*Water Parks: Marine World has a board that tells visitors about how much water you save by not flushing the toilet and how much water you use in a five minute shower- person remembered this from many years ago.

*Monterey Aquarium

*Modern Art Water Exhibit: In San Francisco, Sculptures with water flowing out or caving in.

*Sea World, Mills in Smokey Mountains

 

*Yes, an exhibit in Amsterdam.  It was called the Science Center and it essentially demonstrated the water cycle.  

*Yes, a marble ball in China.  It was essentially a large marble ball that was levitated by water pressure and people had the ability to smoothly move the ball around, as it was suspended.

*World of Color at Disneyland

*Tide pools at the aquarium (very fun)

*Fish Hatchery

*Water Treatment Facility

*Booth on water cycle with Ping Pong Balls

 *What makes water interesting/appealing?

*You can drink it

*Shiny and Sparkles

*Ocean

*Makes Landscape Cool

*Can do sports on it

*Water gun fights

*Supports life

*Sanitation

*Cut stuff with it

 

*Expands when frozen

*Cools you off

*Cook with it

*Use it to make electricity

*It's one of the most neutral and gentle compounds yet also the most powerful as it can literally move mountains.

*I like the tactile aspect of it, most specifically the temperature.  For example, jumping into a cold pool or a warm shower.

*The way it moves and can take any shape or form.

 

*Water is the most essential part of life.

*It's natural, beautiful, delicious, resourceful, takes many forms, etc.

 

*What is your favorite way to interact with water?

*To be in it

*The Ocean

*To Drink it

*Water Slide

*Slip and Slide

*Shower

* Getting water and feeling it.

*Observing water.

*Viewing water.

* I like to play in it.

*Touching cool water. But hearing is also nice.

 

*If you had the ability to manipulate flow in a fountain would you?

  

*Nine people said YES definitely they would stop

*I would manipulate it by putting objects in it, but other than that, no.

*I don't think I'd manipulate it.

 

 

*If you were downtown and stumbled upon a hydro power exhibit would you stop?

*Six people said no, they would move on.

*One person said they would stop only if it really drew them in.

*Two people said “Yes, I would take a look.”

* I would never go out of my way to look at it but if it was just in front of me, then yes.

*If I had the time, then I would.- person who said they would not manipulate the fountain

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Drawings and more Drawings

Development is finally getting started, and it involves a lot of drawing. Drawing this, drawing that... but we're moving, and doodles help everyone see what the artist sees, so communication difficulties are reduced...

We started on Wednesday by just drawing whatever we saw for the exhibit, no specifics, just whatever came to mind. We got lucky, and people ended up picking whole different areas for doodle analysis. Rafael focused on the space as a whole, and how people would interact with different layouts...how having an exhibit split into pieces would be different that having a single structure to gather around. Justin focused on the footprint and overall shape of the exhibit...the figurative boxes everything else would fit inside. Both Julie and I looked at what the water should be doing. Julie had an idea that choosing different paths should cause different things to happen...one path invokes light while another invokes sound. My doodle was looking at a possible stucture, and some of the individual interactive parts.

On Friday, we started making more decisions, zeroing in on what Justin had been doing on Wednesday, as the basic footprint seemed like a good place to start. After lots of discussion, the final doodle had two water flow paths going in opposite directions, with niches breaking up a long rectangle-based shape with only a ffew curves to the basic outline. The maximum height for anything solid was decided to be between 4 and 5 feet to avoid being intimidating. The idea of a roof was discussed, but it was found to have many drawbacks.