Since last blog update

In the 14 days that we have not updated our blog many things have happened:

From our first assignment we got some criticism about out target group. At that point our target group was people between 15 and 30 years of age. This big undefined target group made it difficult to be concrete and we tried to make a product like "one size fits all". 

Instead of this broad target group like the whole graph, we should rather focus on a niche like the 10 percent of the graph. Therefore we had a brainstorm session just on the target group. This brainstorm resulted in the target group we have today: 15 to 30 year old gamers.

Now when we have a focus to motivate gamers to exercise it is easier to make a product to fit their need or the need of their parents.

Our concept is to have a physical object called DareBox which is a center of information. With daily challenges, challenges for friends and achievements. When challenges are completed achievements are received. These achievements are used as in-game awards or the like. When writing our second assignment we figured that we had to make a computer game ourselves but we been told that we could have a fictional partnership with a game company. This fictional partnership will make our product easier to accomplish.

Today we have discussed many possible forms for our physical product and also the interface. Tomorrow we will write the third assignment.

Feedback and guidiance

Monday we received feedback from our TA team for our Project Brief assignment. We were told that our argumentation for the choice of the age range from 15 to 30 years of age was semi-generalized, meaning that we didn't provide the sources for our knowledge

As a guidance we was told to contact people who are professional and work with people who exercise and also contact a mental couch to find out what really motivates people.

We have decided to contact a wrestling couch in Randers, and Sunday we will observe his training session and he will also tell us his techniques for motivating people.

Today we visit Fitness.dk where we will observe what people do when they exercise and we will interview the people who work there.

Friday

Last Friday, the 13th of April, we worked on the assignment Projekt brief with an intense focus on the mapping part of the assignment.

Day 5-8

Since the last update on this blog we have formulated questions for semi-structurered interviews. During the Easter Holiday we have interviewed some relatives / family. From this we found:

• Rewards are an important factor when discussing motivation for excercise. An example is in a gym class in a state school: If 7 of the children / teenagers ran a distance faster than their teacher, the teacher would buy the class soft drinks.
• More to come..

The following day we talked about our target area, and we ended up settling on motivation to excercise for 18-30 year old people to prevent obesity. We also created a survey using Google which will later be published.

Today, 11. of  April 2012, following Tim's lecture we took note of the Nike+ Fuel Band. We looked this up as an inspiration and found other a-like products:

• BodyBugg
• Adidas miCoach
• FitBit ultra
• JawBone Up

A lot of these are some kind of bracelet which tracks your movement which you later can look up on a matching website. The ability to compete with your friends by sharing this data was also a common seen feature.

We will now concentrate on the Brief Projekt for Friday.

Day 4

Today we made an affinity diagram as planned to create an overview of our ideas.  Afterwards we discussed which ideas we all wanted to work with and removed the rest. As we as a group had generated a huge amount of ideas we decided to have multiple voting rounds:

In the first round we voted for three of our favorite ideas of each subject.
In the second we just had two votes on each subject
After the second vote we voted on our top 5 ideas in all which left us with about 10 ideas.
During the voting we also discussed the ideas that just got one vote and decided to remove some of them
In the last voting round we chose our top 3 ideas, which left us with the following ideas:

• Diet
• Exercise
• Stress
• Sleeping disorders
• Asthma
• Allergy

After further discussion of these ideas we figured out, that we all have a passion about exercise as we added the word motivation.

Conclusion of todays work:
We have decided to work on the main subject of prevention and our focus is Motivation to Exercise.

Goals for tomorrow
Decide how we want to gather data and formulate the questions

Day 3

Today we have made a more thorough brainstorm building upon Friday's brainstorm session. We brainstormed chronological on the three main subjects:

1. Prevention / rehabilitation
2. Chronic illnesses
3. Support to elderly people in their own homes

We have also discussed which ideas, themes and problems we prefer to work with. These include:

Prevention
Lifestyle diseases, sleeping disorders and stress

Chronic illnesses
Blindness, hearing disabilities,  phobias, allergies, asthmatics, autism, schizophrenia, adrenalin junkies

Support to elderly people in their own homes
Independence, social and physical activation

Goals for tomorrow

• Affinity diagrams which will help us categorize our ideas
• Narrowing down the spectrum of ideas to 1-3 ideas
• Contact possible partners