a new post

I know I have been neglecting this blog for a long time. Apparently keeping up a blog is more difficult than I thought. Not so much 2.0 after all even though my twitter is doing fine.

for those of you still reading and perhaps to give it a new impulse for the final stages of my project; an update!

I am now finishing the final parts of the first half of my analysis report and I am struggling to make it make sense. In the past I have become accustomed to a more scientific style of writing; do your research, make conclusions and fit it in an intro-method-results-conclusion-discussion format. easy. Not so with ViP (Vision in Productdesign) where I am defining the context of interactive exhibition experiences. A context is the result of many factors which are not necessarily logically connected, making a linear structure within the report, if not impossible, at least extremely impractical. To break from my habits takes a lot of effort and I find myself rewriting again and again what I used to be able to write without even proofreading. And today is no exception, what I wrote yesterday evening and what seemed fine, needs improvement again.

So today I will once again attempt at trying to define the clusters which I came up with. For those of you unfamiliar with the ViP method (very much like myself) this might require a quick explanation. I will try to make it simple.

Basically the ViP method argues that all products are linked with the context they appear in. So to design most effectively you will need to define the context you are working in first. To do this you de-construct the situation making it as abstract as possible until you have a set of 'truths' that apply within the context. These 'truths' we conveniently refer to as context factors.

for example:

an observation:
people whisper in museums and don't take paintings of the wall for closer inspection

an abstract truth behind it:
(within museums) people are bound by social rules

like that.
grouping contexfactors leads to 'clusters' which generally describe main themes which are at play within the context.

another example:
several context factors:
1. people like to explore
2. people are curious about the unknown

cluster:
curiosity and exploration is a human inclination

But now its becoming hard to simplify it. the clusters I came up with of course are made up of many more context factors, (I think I have more than 100) which are extremely hard to juggle around.

Now to make matters worse, these clusters need to be abstracted back into one statement which ultimately describes the context. This statement I can then go back to during my design process.

i am thinking of the following;

Perception is Reality

but well get back to that.
In the mean time all of it has to be structured and written down, but I am looking forwards to actual hard designing.