Oh my goodness it’s the break! How exciting! Even though it’s not exactly a break because I still have work to do, it is still nice to not have classes and pretend like I’m relaxing a little more. 

I’m glad that I’ve moved into the prototyping phase because it feels a little bit more fun than research. I enjoy making various things and coming up with different ideas. This week I finished writing all of my question prompts and printed them out onto small paper cutouts. Essentially, I made a paper prototype of a set of conversation starter cards. 

As you can see in the photo, I colour coded each card based on the Mana Kai category it fell under. If you recall from last week, the categories are: Mana Kai - sustenance from food, Mana O Te Taiao/Whenua - life force of the natural environment and Mana o te Tangata - harvesting and fair distribution of food (The Aotearoa Circle, 2022). I made the prototype so I could play with it myself but also in preparation for user testing with my classmates. I didn’t have any user testing sessions planned yet but the cards were very easy to make so I thought, why not just make it now? I quite like this mindset of doing things on my to do list that aren’t necessarily urgent but will end up needing to be done eventually. That sounds like common sense but I, like many other students, have become very used to procrastinating throughout University.

I also began ideating the final design of the cards. I knew there were three elements I wanted to include: the question, a category marker that is visible when sorting through the cards, and the name of the category. Based on these requirements, I brainstormed a lot of different layouts on Illustrator.

I took inspiration from Pinterest, my intuition and different card/board games I’ve played. I’m leaning towards a portrait layout but honestly other than that I’m pretty undecided. I’m planning to ask my classmates to vote for their favourites and use that to help me decide on a final layout. 

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