Design Review #1

The Design Review is a presentation of your progress/results from the first sprint or phase and both faculty and students can give feedback regarding your project. As a group, team PLANTS! organized and rehearsed extensively in preparation. We reflected on the comments given by our section leaders and ninjas at the benchtop reviews (mini sit-downs) and worked together towards what we understood as the expectations for the first phase. The objectives on the course website listed.

We assembled the personas, 2x2 maps, mood cards and insight statements generated until this point in order to show our progress and allowed each group member to present on different sections of the presentation: the tools used, different types of people identified, personas and stories, patterns of themes and tensions, and insight statements.We pointed out our starmaps as one of the ways we captured values and indicated uses of other charts for mapping out motivations/values between both the users and designers. The insight statements were generated as a group to produce a final listing of the most prevalent themes to keep in the back of our mind for the second phase. They ranged from the fact that gardeners saw more value in the process than the product (i.e. gave away their food freely); community gardens are undervalued for their lack of financial product/tangibility and gardeners crave respect for their work; and the repeated theme/language of passing on knowledge to younger generations.

Ultimately, we received wonderful feedback and I am still surprised at how well the presentation came out. We were commended for taking steps at finally getting at the heart of gardening with our insights but were also encouraged to go deeper into our storytelling techniques for better understanding and communication.

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