Ravensbourne School and Chris Vanstone

Duration: 1 day
Teacher: Jon Attwood (Head of Department)
Students: Year 9

Product designer Chris Vanstone is one half of design consultancy Human Beans. He was matched with Ravensbourne by the Design Council.

Activity

Chris kicked off with a presentation on his work for Kodak. He detailed some of the user-focused research methods he'd used, such as spending time with ten families observing their use of cameras and photos.

He then introduced the first activity - creating a user profile. For this he used the Through the Keyhole teaching resource from the DiSW 2003 packs (see 'Resources' top-right to download a copy).

The resource contains three sets of photos depicting three different households, minus the inhabitants. Chris asked the class, split into three teams to work out who lives in each home. They then built up a profile and created a 'mood board' to express the character of their user.

Chris then revealed the brief - to design a product to take, store and share photographs. Each team was to have three solutions, roughly sketched, to present to the class at the end of the day.

Results

One team profiled a seven-year-old girl they named Morgan. A rack of dressing up clothes in one of the photos suggested a drama queen who enjoyed dressing up in her fairy costume.

So one idea was for a camera shaped as a fairy wand, featuring a ten-second timer, enabling Morgan to photograph herself dressed in her outfits. The camera printed out instant photo stickers, as the team felt Morgan would enjoy personalising her belongings with them.

Feedback

Designer

Chris was delighted with how engaged the students had become. He was particularly impressed with how well they had put themselves into the shoes of others.

Teacher

Jon enthused about the day, especially the benefits of spending a whole day on the activity. 'They really had time to get their teeth into design. And you can't underestimate the benefit of a day off-timetable,' he said.

Jon felt the effort of organising the day was well worth it to give his students a welcome break from formality and enable them to see that there are no wrong answers in designing, just different solutions. He added: 'I won't see the benefit of today until two years from now, when they do their GCSEs. It's all about investing in them.'

Students

The students were positive about their first experience of user-centred design, saying it was great fun and had actually made designing easier, as they could focus their thoughts on a person's needs, rather than beginning with a blank canvas.

They readily admitted that had they been asked to design cameras without doing the Through the Keyhole activity first, their ideas would probably have resembled existing models. As one boy said: 'I'd never have come up with a fairy-wand camera!'