My manifesto and projected future work

Thinking about people:

My manifesto: Design should be; safe, ethical & socially responsible

In design i want to make my users lives easier or better in some way. Be this by streamlining tasks, creating new ways of doing things or by connecting them to other people or objects. I just want to enrich users experiences.

It is through this way of thinking that this brief was created:

I brainstormed ways to enrich users experiences. I identified three spatial areas that people function in: Home, Work, Recreation. Between these areas is the area of Travel-a transient community. Social aspects apply to all four these areas.

My Brief

What is planed to to do:

Investigate people within the four spatial areas.
Select two that area interesting of these two focus on
Re investigate these two spatial areas
Select one
Draw out areas of need/potential improvement from a designers perspective
Discuss these with members of the spatial area
Identify a specific community within this area, and how they interact with the other areas
Research this community
Create prototypes & Test
Final prototype
Production
Finished outcome

I plan on spending around 6 hours minimum on each spatial area for the purposes of initial enquiry, and then making a decision on which two to investigate further. I don't feel that this would be a waste of time, as i would be able to test new research techniques and to be able to compare my observations of each of these spaces.

Travel: Train, Bus, Survey of people using 'Boris bikes', Walking-observe popular routes, Cars-more difficult
Recreational: would separate these into adults and children- observe playgroups for children for example and bars or outdoor pursuits for adults
Home: observe people in their homes, and view how outside influences can affect them. Would have to observe quite a few different people
Work: employees, self employed, office, outdoor, service professions

The next step would be to re investigate two areas in more depth. Techniques: i would like to include more audiovisual investigation as well as more quantitative investigation: i will be observing a large amount of people and it would be useful to get demographic information.

It could be useful to get assistance in the quantitative research.

The first spatial area that is going to be investigated is travel

The travel environment is fascinating, and it is one space where the community is not really a community per say: instead it is a collection of mostly complete strangers. Travelling at the same time via the same method, members of the community might become familiar with each other, but this is rarely translates into friendly recognition in my personal experience.

Areas where strangers come together has recently become a subject of interest. The artist Michael Landry created an ongoing art project about the concept 'random acts of kindness', titled 'Acts of kindness', where he asked members of the public to submit their stories about strangers kindnesses on the tube. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-13815981

 Michael Landry also destroyed all his 7000-odd possessions in a piece titled 'break down' http://artcritical.com/blurbs/LWLandy.htm he systematically destoyed everything he owned in a comment about commercialism and waste. Social contexts and conflicts really interest me, and making a comment on society through art and functional design is quite unsual and interesting.