1. FMP Proposal
Task: Decide on an FMP topic
Methods: Tea drinking, debate, software skills development and presentation practise
Team: Tanya Singh, Zuzana Galova, Roshni Suri
Timeframe: 26th June - 21st July
Reflection Week
Reflection week was intended to allow us time to review a previous project and upgrade it to a portfolio-worthy level. My options were the three projects below:
Image 1: Survival of the Outfit: good documentation but needs more research. (Image by Qibin Cheng)
Image 2: Birdsong project: a simple design with poor documentation. (Image by author)
Image 3: Neighbour Network: good research and outcome but the context needed work (Image by author)
Given the time of year (July), dried twigs and leaves were in short supply, so we agreed to postpone the remake of the bird's nest. The project from the Macro Unit felt unfinished, and there was feedback we hadn’t had the opportunity to address, so we pursued this instead.
Macro Feedback: It was taking an easy path; There were many ways to exploit the system; There are many ways in which it may not work; How does the system even work? Who owns it?
We decided to build the system infrastructure behind the Neighbour Network scheme, considering the people involved more and pulling together more guidelines for the management to address the previous concerns.
Image: Slide from presentation within reflection week to describe the network scheme.
Unfortunately, our presentation order and structure fell apart when we were asked to give additional information, as we didn’t have all the information readily available for this, so the clarity of our explanation was poor. Additionally, during the week, we realised that the scheme we had designed previously had faults we were struggling to overcome, and in hindsight, this may not have been the best use of our reflection week. In reflection, we are not service designers or system designers, and our changes were not experiential.
The UX of Tea
The UX of Tea was born from my cup of Earl Grey during the brainstorming session.
We realised tea has depth and breadth as a topic, from its cultural and social aspects, rich history and our thoughts on how unique and personal it can be. We developed a problem statement where we surmised that tea was becoming under-appreciated in the grab-and-go coffee world.
Design a multi-sensory social experience centred around the act of drinking tea.
Our process included brainstorming around the topic and conducting some directed storytelling, alongside simply drinking tea to understand the various methods and rituals.
Images: Tea making process for one. Images by author
Video: Tea-making process from the storytelling research. Images and voice by Jen Tomkins. Shared with permission.
Our insights led us to understand that the act of drinking tea is already very experiential in the following key areas:
- The warmth that comes from holding the hot cup - The slow pace at which tea is made - The social aspects that tea is a facilitator of conversation
Sketches around alternative tea experiences. Images by author.
The more we discussed the topic, the further from an outcome we were.
Tea-drinking rituals are ancient and well established
Have been tested over hundreds of years
The deconstruction of tea would make the experience less enjoyable than it is
Forcing people to change their social behaviours around tea drinking would also have potentially adverse effects.
So, we held a tea party.
It would answer the brief we had written: it was multi-sensory, it was social, it was an experience, and it was centred around tea. We each picked an item to make and planned the staging to be visually engaging, tasty, and fun.
The tea party selection. Image by author.
Although I can’t deny the image of Al’s delighted face wasn’t a motivating factor in the decision-making process, the change from a standard presentation to a social gathering had evolved the atmosphere to a more engaged, interested audience, who were experiencing the tea party together (and the envy of others in the room!). A key point of feedback was that we could have observed and recorded the tea party as a piece of research and to help our reflection after the presentation.
Also, it was noted that we had developed a unique research method - during our week, we had found that the intimacy of sharing a cup of tea was a soft and calm way to talk and discuss items, something we will implement the next time we interview a participant in person.
The UX of Gendered Language
This idea was born of a group discussion about our challenges as women. We each had experiences where we had encountered sexism, most often occurring in the workplace.
We looked at the different forms of language: formal and informal, spoken and written, and decided our focus would be on the more traditional written aspects of the workplace, i.e. emails.
Interview transcripts and analysis.
We conducted a series of short interviews to establish how women of various ages and backgrounds can gain a broader understanding of how sexism could be experienced in any workplace scenario. The insights from this research taught us that sexism was influenced heavily by the company culture as much as a particular person’s views.
"Yes, it is a bit tricky - there are not many women in our workplace, so there is always the pressure of not being ’the silly girl’ who makes mistakes. I am careful."
"...but he would not do the same to the man; men were usually favoured in my company"
This meant that tackling this at the surface would be challenging, and it became a project too large for a one-week brief.
Through the research, we had landed on the phrase ‘difficult woman’, and further conversations with participants led us to the idea that we should take back the term, own it and embrace it.
Definition of a difficult. Image by Zuzana Galova.
The design outcomes were in two forms:
A slide from the presentation showing the two ourcomes.
A mirror vinyl print for use in public/workplace/hospitality bathrooms, which itemised the associations with being a ‘difficult woman’. This would have been taken up for selfies and posted on social media, with the intention that it was a good and proud thing to be
A badge with the words ‘difficult woman’ on it to quietly declare this is who you are, and you’re not afraid of people knowing.
In the presentation, we outlined the research and outcome and that we had no interest in pursuing this topic further for FMP. In the feedback session, we were advised to think about what we had learned and focus on this to identify why we didn’t want to continue the project.
We learned that our varied experiences and backgrounds mean we have unique starting points for each discussion. I hope this means we won’t bias our designs towards ourselves since we each have a distinctive perspective.
We also learned that we are passionate about injustice and wrongs in the world, something that would come back into prominence in the design of our outcome.
The Religion of Money
We each produced a new list of ideas we could explore together: the two that resonated together well were religion and money. We decided upon this line of enquiry:
Religion as a structure was a massive part of our Western society, and we felt it had declined. Now, money was the dominant power, but should it be?
The team and I worked quickly and efficiently to prepare our presentation and ourselves for the upcoming months away from the university. Using Notion, we created:
a calendar to log our holidays and availability
a reading list to share our notes and track progress
a to-do list linked to our shared documents.
To assemble the presentation, we divided the work, each producing a section before cross-reviewing to ensure we agreed on the content. The team were more experienced using Figma for this than I was, so we used this as a teaching/learning opportunity to bring me up to speed on the software. In return, my presentation experience extended much further than theirs, so I coached them on presenting.
Final presentation slides.
Our presentation successfully communicated our intentions for the project. The feedback was primarily based on our varied research methods and that our topic was extensive, and we would need to find a micro aspect to work with. We agreed with this and noted that we intended to use our research methods to aid us with this.
댓글