Interactio Design Method - Elito Method

ASSIGNMENT 5 | Data Analysis using the Elito MethodI 543 Interaction Design Method | Zan Morris, Melissa Tang

CONTENTS

CONTENTS Page

Basic Information 1

Concept #1 Self-cleaning food processor 2

Concept #2 Coffee Table with Built-in Fridge and Freezer 3

Concept #3 App on Electronic Album 4

Concept #4 Digital Gaming Cards 5

Concept #5 Mega-PC 6

Concept #6 Style Switcher 7

Concept #7 Shifting Knife 8

Concept #8 Home-Centered Headset 9

Concept #9 IoT location system 10

Concept #10 Laundry E-Tag 11

Reflection 12

1

INFORMATIONBasic

Date: Feb 23, 2014

To study clutter and hoarding in the home, we conducted an ethnography research in two Chinese International students’ home.

We used Elito Method to analyze the data. We listed all the observations, our judgements, possible values of users, our conception drawn from the observations and key metaphor. In total we have 79 oberservations and came up with 44 concepts. Finally we narrowed down to 10 final concepts.

I 543 Interaction Design Method | Data Analysis Using the Elito Method | Zan Morris, Melissa Tang

CONCEPT #1

2

Self-cleaning food processor

Description: Food processor with a special mode to clean itself. Basically, users can replace the knife with brush in the food processor. When he/she puts some dish detergent and choose the “clean mode”, the food processor can clean itself.

Rationale: This reduces cleaning work of food pro-cessor. Many people don’t use food processors fre-quently even though they’re a very useful kitchen tool, just because they don’t like cleaning it. This (or other) self-cleaning techniques could be added to a variety of objects (Blenders, for example), to make them more appealing and easier to people who just want to make food quickly.


Brush

CONCEPT #2

3I 543 Interaction Design Method | Data Analysis Using the Elito Method | Zan Morris, Melissa Tang

Fridge: provide cooled drinks

Freezer:provide icecubes

Coffee Table with Built-in Fridge and Freezer

Description: Simply a coffee table equipped with a mini-fridge and freezer underneath

Rationale: People would have more convenient access to cooled drinks and snacks, along with ice. Many peo-ple have mini-fridges in their homes for quick access to avoid the treck to the kitchen. Especially helpful when guests are over and you don’t want to miss out on a fun conversation. Finally, the space under coffee table is well used.

CONCEPT #3

4

App on Electronic Album

Description: This is an app to help people learn new vocabulary. Basically, it’s a flash card, which can be set in the user’s physical environment, and remind them about the words as the pass through every day. It can also connect to a language learning or dictionary app. So users can use the album to review new words.

Rationale: The electronic album blends the worlds of flash card and photo frame. It can serve as both deco-ration and learning tool, and its digital frame allows it to display more than simple physical concepts (In our subject’s home it was more theoretical or academic words that he had trouble with). Passing through the room where this is every day could simply be a helpful reminder when learning a new language.


CONCEPT #4

5

Digital Gaming Cards

Description: Thin e-paper cards which are blank to start. A player loads their decks into a set of these from a central location (which keeps track of what the player owns). Rationale: This allows players to play their favorite game with physical cards, but without the hassle of trying to organize and store masses of cards. In addition, this could be a universal system across all types of card games, so it allows for quick switching of games. Finally, many games could have special animations or interactions de-pendant on the playstyle.


CONCEPT #5


Mega-PC

Description: A centralized processing hub for an entire household - One mega pc could control a vast array of user profiles and processing. Users would not usually interact with this pc directly, but through any number of devices (Tablets, Gaming systems, TVs, etc.)

Rationale: People spend a huge amount of money on technology and must upgrade each of them separately - in addition this means that there’s a huge amount of processing power just “floating there” unused. If kept in a central location and used as needed, people would have less need for many devices, (The same device could be set up with separate profiles for different uses) and could do much more powerful processing with what’s available.

CONCEPT #6


Style Switcher

Description: An inner-wall system hidden behind cho-sen ‘art spots’ which people would use to curate and save examples of their favorite work. These could be catalogued and set to a certain ‘style’ or setting - with the touch of a button the user could switch out all the art in a room to display different styles for different moods or guests.

Rationale: This one is a little bit more ‘for fun’, but has practical uses as well. We may have specific artwork which we love but are uncomfortable with certain guests seeing. Also, people may have eclectic tastes, but feel like each piece doesn’t necessarily fit together - we could restyle our houses just as easily as changing as PC’s desktop wallpaper. May also entice people to explore varieties of artwork as well.

CONCEPT #7


Shifting Knife

Description: This is a dual system which uses a knife and cutting board. The cutting board would have a sen-sor which would detect what type of food is set upon it, and send a signal to the knife. The knife would then transform into the specific type of knife best suited for dealing with the food. Users could of course override this if they preferred a certain setting.

Rationale: This would be instrumental for reducing clutter in the kitchen, and could be a huge time-saver, keeping you from hunting down a misplaced knife. In addition, the switch might challenge users to use the new kinds of knives which they hadn’t yet experienced, and could bring them further down the path to being a master chef.

CONCEPT #8


Home-Centered Headset

Description: A gaming/work headset which could have alerts tied in from the physical home environment. This could be linked to any number of things, such as the Doorbell, a laundry alert, a kitchen timer, a fire alarm, etc.

Rationale: This is pretty self explanatory, but when we’re busy at work or play it can be incredibly easy to forget another responsibility even in our direct sur-rounding environment. Even setting phone alerts may not be enough in some cases (such as for when they laundry’s done or someone showing up at the door.)

CONCEPT #9


IoT location system

Description: Each item in the person’s environment would be equipped with a descriptor chip, which sends a signal to a central device. The person could then vo-cally query the device to locate a hidden object.

Rationale: Our use case is specifically aimed at houses usually occupied by many people - in this case items may be moved around and resorted without any defin-ing organizational structure. Usually when other people are around, the user would simply ask where an item is. If alone, this safety net is missing, and thus this system gives the user help locating an object.

CONCEPT #10


Laundry E-Tag

Description: Attached to the normal tag on the back of clothes, we suggest placing an e-tag. These tags could be queried by a central device (such as a phone app), and used for a variety of things. Sorting laundry is our main focus though, and through a trigger an LED would light up allowing the user to quickly compare information for each piece of clothing.

Rationale: When laundry piles up and is left over time, it’s pretty hard to quickly sort through a huge pile of it. By shining lights (such as a bright Red for “Worn a lot and hasn’t been cleaned recently”), it allows someone to quickly grab for the lights, sort their laundry in a few minutes, and get on with doing more interesting work.

REFLECTION


Melissa’s Reflection:

I think the Elito Method is a connection between observational study and design concept. It does help us to sum-marize and analyze the raw data (notes, recording, video...etc). When we tried our best to list all the observations, we reflected many details of the ethnography research. The challenge is to find out which observation is worth to go deeper and to frame a design problem space.

But I’m not sure why we have to investigate the value behind each observation. I do know it may help us think the motivation behind the observation. But the value we listed are quite subjective. Maybe we should go back to revisit our subjects to verify our thinking. Or it’s so difficult to speculate the value behind certain behavior by ourselves. Another question is why we don’t have “insight” column and just come up with concept directly from observation, judgement and value.

Zan’s reflection:

I’m not sure what to think of the Elito method. Granted, some of its shortcomings might have to do with our eth-nography (which itself needed work), but it seemed like in most cases just jotting down any observation didn’t lead to much. Certainly revisiting the study in depth gave us a lot of insight, but I’m just not sure that this method in particular was helpful. I definitely agree with Melissa that the specific columns don’t quite seem to add up to the concept necessarily. The ‘Key Metaphor’ especially seemed extraneous as we usually ended up talking about rows by their Observation or Concept.

And although we came up with a number of concepts I like, it seems like it took an inordinate amount of time to do so, and more time was spent trying to figure out or re-word whether something counted as a Judgment or an Observation. And finally, reorganizing an out-of-order spreadsheet isn’t simple. While it was nice to dig deeper into this Ethnography, I’m not sure that this process of doing so in particular was helpful. I’m looking forward to doing the structured Affinity Diagramming, to see how it compares and contrasts with Elito, as it was very helpful in the past.

Technology

Interactio Design Method - Elito Method