Team 1: Early Concepts and Body-storming
Today after much deliberation our team of 10, from the research phase of this project, was broken into 3 teams based on the concepts that we choose to carry forward into the design phase. Our team choose to focus on the most vulnerable road users to emissions and particulate mater from vehicles, cyclists. Our goal is to promote cleaner air routes for inner city cyclists to improve their experience of commuting throughout the city and to maintain healthy lungs for those who are using a form of transport that has know impact on air pollution.
Once we had decided to cater our design towards this demographic of road user, we explored the potential of a cycle helmet that feed live air quality information to the user, based on google glasses technology, we moved swiftly into a workshop of quickly paper prototyping the idea and bringing it out into the world to test.The artefact that we prepared was made of cardboard, and using the Dublin Bike service we quickly began to examine how the helmet may work and be received by the public. The helmet is fitted with a visor that acts as a heads up display feeding information directly to the user in really time, indicated the quality of air in the current area based on the EPA's data read from their city monitoring station.
This body-storming session provided the team with some very valuable insights into how the product might be received from the public, generally inner city cyclist's avoid wearing helmets for many reasons: journeys are generally short and travelling speeds are slow, also aesthetically helmets are seen as 'uncool'.Also there was a general consensus amongst the members of the public who performed usability tests, that the information appearing visually or through audio could be very alarming and a potential hazard to a cyclist who is trying to concentrate on safely navigating through traffic, without the addition of avoiding air pollution pockets.
After this day, we learned valuable lessons about what types of information and the form that information has to be delivered to cyclists. We returned to the studio to work...............
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