Last Blog Post

What topic did I learn from during this semester? There have been many, but one that comes to mind is the importance of prototyping. Our discussion on building prototypes was insightful, and informative. It wasn’t until I started to build our group’s prototype that I fully understood its importance. Originally, our group decided on making one product. The product was to be a patio table accessory that allows you to have a heater instead of an umbrella. We evolved this into a table accessory that allows you to switch between a heater and an umbrella with ease, to make the patio table more useful during cold and hot seasons. When I searched online for images to model our prototype after, I discovered pictures of heater poles in the center of patio tables, and of course umbrellas as well. Even though I never found a table center that was designed to incorporate both an umbrella and a heater, I still felt that we needed to upgrade our idea to make it more unique. This is when we came up with the full blown Backyard Collective idea. I moved forward with the prototype, figuring it would help illustrate a sample of our product line. While I didn’t have the time or resources I wanted, I still developed a simple prototype that I learned a lot from. I had to think about the mechanics of designing a product that would fit under most patio tables. Basically, through building the prototype, I realized that we needed something narrow that could fit underneath the legs of whatever patio table customers might already have. Building the prototype also showed me that we would need to account for the extra weight of the heater pole versus the umbrella. With the design sketches, done after building the prototype, I addressed this functionality with special grooves for extra support around the heater pole. Through this process, I better understood how prototyping helps people think about what customers really want and need.

The image collage was a great topic as well. Running through this in class, with the personal image collage assignment got me thinking about the benefits of an image collage. While designing my own, I spent a lot of time thinking about what images mattered to me, and how they conveyed my feelings. Explaining it to my group also added another dimension to the collage as I figured out how best to put my thoughts into words and use the images to demonstrate this. I wasn’t the only one who thought the image collage was a good idea. Thew rest of our group agreed it was a good way to gain insights about the person putting together the collage. We used an image collage concept in our gathering insights phase. We asked for our subjects to submit pictures of their ideal backyard. A full blown image collage would have been more beneficial, but due to time constraints, we felt that a collection of images would suffice. The concept was the same, with our subjects submitting images and interpreting their thoughts and feelings about the images in relation to their ideal vision of a backyard. This helped us understand what we needed to do to help them improve the backayard.

This project was challenging, but I think we did a good job. It was difficult at first to get moving on the backyard, since none of us had our own backyard, and only one of us knew very many empty nesters. It was difficult to get past the planning stage of our gathering insights process. We couldn’t find enough people to take our survey among empty nesters we knew. But once we though about taking the surveys online and posting them on empty nester online communities, we got a good amount of results. With results to work from, our group did a good job moving forward and brainstorming ideas. It was a collaborative effort throughout the way, with everyone bouncing ideas off of each other. Professor Walls helped us out along the way, with his class brainstorming session and the idea about some sort of service to offer for the backyard as opposed to a product. We took his idea and adjusted it a bit to better suit the needs of our target group. We had fun putting the powerpoint together, and I think the presentation turned out very well. The group felt involved with the final product, even though Joaquin could not make the presentation. It was a positive experience, and I think we all learned about the importance of using customer insights when designing and marketing products or services.