INF 4260
Sensing Oslo
Wonder Document
Helene Wiborg, Pernille Rebne, Silje O. Hauge and Trine Paulsrud
Wonder Document
Group name: Sensing Oslo
Main idea
Our idea is to make an attraction for the Children Museum in Oslo. The user group will be
children around the age of five.
Our overview focus will be to discover the use of senses, but we are open to change,
depending on the information we get by interacting with our users. We want to let the children
take an active part in the design process and therefore we want to engage them into the
process at the very beginning and collaborate with them throughout the design process. We
hope that our approach towards participatory design will give us valuable knowledge and
experience working with users throughout the design process. It is important to emphasis that
our main goal is to understand the process and not to create a completely functional prototype.
Problem space
In this project we will focus on a problem space that does not exist yet. The Children’s
Museum is Oslo is not built and therefore we have to look at what the intention is for the
museum and what has been done at this type of museums in other places in the world. We do
agree with the people working with the project that the need for this type of museum is
present in Oslo. There is nothing quite like this at the moment. There has been conducted
research including conversations with teachers, parents and children to back up this
assumption.
Assumptions
It is important to make our assumptions explicit before we start the actual design process. As
a group we found out that we have several assumptions about what this type of museum needs
but also about children and their interaction with technology. When it comes to the museum
in itself we do believe, like previously mentioned, that the need for this type of museum is
present in Oslo. We think that it will be fun for children because they like to use their bodies
to explore and figure things out. We think that this type of place needs to have some aspect of
creative chaos but also help the children create their own experiences.
We also have an assumption about children and technology. This is that technology does not
scare children the way it can with adults. The children of today are growing up using
technology every day and to them it is transparent. We assume that they will focus on what is
happening because the technology is such an integrated part of their lives that they will not
see this as something special.
Conceptual framework
Since our users are children, this shapes our conceptual framework. We must create
something without a user’s manual, that everything should be figured out on their own. It
must be something that several persons can do at the same time, so the installation must allow
interaction. We must create something that affords activity, and trigger the curiosity. We will
take advantage of the children’s senses, but don’t know specific how we will do this. This will
be figured out much more in detail after our first workshop.
Process
“It's a process when a a goal-directed problem solving activity informed by intended use,
target domain, materials, cost, and feasibility. ...”
In order to be goal directed we need to know who the users are, and what the users need.
From there on, we can develop an alternative design, and further on build an interactive
version of the design. As earlier mentioned, our user group is around the age of five. In order
to know what they want, we have arranged workshops in a kindergarten at Majorstuen in
Oslo. At this stage the museum does not exist, which gives us the opportunity to play with our
imagination as we feel like. The problem is that none of us have a specific idea of what we
believe children at age 3-5 will love, and therefore it is important for the group to get in touch
with the users at an early stage. It would be desirable to have an full time involvement with
the users, but we only have a short amount of time, and in that time we have only managed to
schedule 3 workshops in the kindergarten. As the literature states, the users may not know
what they want, therefore we thought the first workshop should contain a set of different
activities to stimulate the children’s creativity. The group members will take parts of these
activities, but the most important thing for us will be to try to study the children's behavior,
hopefully both cognitive and physical. In this way, we can learn more about their capabilities
and also get a view at what children today think is entertaining. Context is of course an
important pinpoint, but we think that kindergarten and the Children's museum can be two
rather likely places to go, of course with some differentials. The most important differential
here will be the focus on how long the attraction has to stay amusing and possible to learn
anything from, any the fact that parents will appear at the museum.
After the first workshop we hope to have an better idea of what our contribution to the
Children's museum will be, and from there we will try to develop one or several alternative
designs. In the question of how to choose among the different designs, we will need to do
some evaluation inside the group where the matter of feasibility, quality, safety and not at
least usability will be important clues. Further on, we want to use the other workshops as a
part of the evaluation process, and test our ideas on the children, and redesign until we get
close to a desirable attraction for the museum.
When it comes to the cost and the risk, we will not go into that in this addition of the paper,
because at this point we do not know what to make, and most likely we will never get as far as
actually building the attraction for the Children's museum, so material cost will probably be
leveled down to the use of paper and pens.
The last point of our process is a deep evaluation of the whole project.