Stage 2 Summary

This stage began with the goal to ‘Inspire Participation Outdoors,’ with a particular focus on bringing people together in a park. We wanted to explore ways to help people utilize technology to get outside and partake in an activity either as an individual in a social environment or with a group. As we continued to brainstorm and began speaking with people, we realized that both now and in the future, people need balance in their lives. With the escalating pace of life, balance becomes increasingly more difficult. As ubiquitous technology becomes incorporated into every aspect of life, the question becomes how can people utilize technology to get away and be more active?

In order to answer this question, we first needed to understand how people currently are or are not active and the reasons why. We gathered a multitude of data from literature review, observations, artifact gathering, directed storytelling, and interviews. In order to understand all of the data, we created an affinity diagram that lead to a two-part model of our research findings. This helped us redefine our focus as Enabling Participatory Healthy Lifestyles.



We gave a presentation of our findings of stage 2:

Models of our Findings

To synthesize and display the data we gathered, we created a two step model. The before shows what currently is: there are barriers between potential for activity and actual participation. Our goal is to reduce some of these barriers and increase the amount of participation.
BEFORE		AFTER

Pick-up Games

To find out more about what is involved with playing people you do not know, we went to the gym and offered pizza to pick-up basketball players to invite them to talk with us. We asked them a serious of questions about what influenced them to play pick-up today, how they get to know other players, how they react to different skill levels, and about other challenges that they face. We talked to ten different people about their experiences. We found out a lot about the difficulties that some of these players had as this was their second time trying to play pick-up.

Research Synthesis

To get a shared understanding among the team of all of our interviews and directed storytelling sessions we wrote each idea that we gathered on post-its and created an affinity diagram. We were looking for patterns and design ideas.

Directed Storytelling/Interviews

We have scheduled and begun a series of directed storytelling/interview sessions with ten different people in order to get a better understanding of activities, motivations, and social interactions. They span a broad range including activity planners, pick-up game enthusiasts, social butterflies, and the less active.

Artifact Gathering and Observation

To gather data, we broke up into two groups and went to various locations including: Shenley Park, Phipps Conservatory, Oakland Library, Cathedral of Learning, Kiva Han, the University Center. We got a sense of the current activities, methods for communicating events, and motivations for individuals to get outside. We documented our observations of the types of people we saw, took pictures of interesting events and artifacts, and spoke to a few individuals. Even though it was a cloudy day, we ended up with a lot of data.