Saturday, May 05, 2007

MBA Design Leadership elective - week 2




The second week of the joint project between MBAs at Saïd Business School and MA Design Interactions students at the Royal College of Art took the design process a stage further. MA students each presented their initial concepts for products and services which ranged from a "Spiritual Gym" to a "Manifesto for a Better London".

The photos show a simple prototype for an "Antenna", a product proposed by Kenichi Okada and Chris Woebken. Inspired by the ways ants sense their environment, these students constructed a simple device which has a microscope at the end of a stick, connected to a laptop showing what the microscope sees. Thus this device offers a different way of looking and making connections - only able to 'see' in extreme detail. But as the second photo shows, using this device in public generates social interactions that generate different kinds of data.

The point of this exercise is not to develop a product from this prototype but rather to explore the ways (student) designers go about generating, testing and communicating their ideas - such as the power of prototyping to instantiate concepts. The MBAs and MAs voted on which products and services to take forward, and then spent time analyzing their features, prioritizing some for the next iteration of the design. The third photo shows one of the matrices generated in which design features are organized under four headings.

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