Discovery Phase

Our semester began with a “discovery” phase, which familiarized us with the Maker Ed challenge and existing documentation practices within the IDeATe program. We developed our initial research findings through several rounds of user studies. This research phase was critical in identifying the needs of our clients, both IDeATe and MakerEd, and using these to form design implications for our continued concept and prototype development.

Below, we present some of the pictures and checkpoints along our discovery phase:

• We first conducted interviews to understand more about general documentation and portfolio practices. This took the form of interviewing 4 different portfolio creators, and we used affinity mapping to analyze the resulting data.
• After the exploration into general documentation practices, we investigated current documentation practices within the IDeATe program. One major theme that emerged was student motivation, and we created a concept tree rooted at "Motivation" in order to pinpoint several specific areas that our design solution could target.
• We also developed user profile insight boards, which helped us understand the varied backgrounds, talents, and experiences of our user study interviewees.