By: Anna Pestaloza
Keywords: Work 2020, Communication, Digital Technology, Spontaneous, Curious, Effective
Final presentation poster: Click here
Design Goal and Interaction Vision:
“I want to give people working as self-entrepreneurs an easy and direct way to identify and recognize each other, as people with whom they could have a useful exchange of ideas, to support their work and share their knowledge.”
I used the metaphor of “love at first sight” to better describe my interaction vision. I wanted to give to two people, participating to the same co-working event, the possibility of recognizing each other from distance, and feel a kind of attraction that could lead them towards each other.
Research Explorations:
At first I wanted to discover how self-entrepreneurs that work in the same space (co-workings) interact with each other. They had to draw and describe how their workspace was like and which kind of connections they made there in a workbook. After reading the booklets I had to adjust my design goal, since I discovered that the main problem was not to bond with the people working at the same co-working space, but with people they meet at events for co-workers and self-entrepreneurs. These events take place once a month and anyone can join them.
I went on with an online research on how you register to participate and how can you find meaningful collaborations in a small amount of time. I went to a co-working event, I gave some questionnaires around. I noticed that the tagging system that had been used to match profiles of people participating to the event was scary. I have also noticed that people were very afraid their descriptions could be misunderstood.
Design Explorations:
I tested a first prototype at the IOB event (Figure 1). I made some badges with a main shape indicating the main professional field of the person wearing it. I attached on the background shape some stickers of other fades, corresponding to different aspects of that main field. Feedbacks: people were happy to be able to personalize and make up their badges at the moment. Too many colors on the badges were confusing, the informations were not clear. A lot of people are colour-blind, shades are difficult to distinguish.
The second test was carried at the Career Event at YesDelft. I worked with the staff to make personalized badges for each participant, based on the questionnaires about their profession they filled in when they subscribed for the event. The background color differentiated students from companies, the shape stood for the professional field and the icons for the skills. Feedbacks: the badges worked well as icebreakers, icons and shapes were too difficult to understand, having something that tells too explicitly what you do could ruin the concrete interaction.
Third exploration: a game to test the efficacy of the product as an ice-breaker.
Final Design:
Pikpoke is an electronic badge that will help you to find people to share knowledge with, based on the infos about yourself you registered in it. Pikpoke will be your wing-man, the one that gives you the hint to start talking to a person that you find interesting, but you don’t know how to approach. When it detects another badge that has similar informations registered in, both the badges lights up, giving to the people wearing them a hint to approach each other. The signal is not too explicit, it is just a light, so the two people will have to talk in order to understand what they have in common. The aperture or closure of the diaphragm is a way to concretely set the specificity of the search.
