As I mentioned last week, we are now moving into the Implementation phase!!! Although the Implementation phase as defined by IDEO is more about actual real world implementation (IDEO, 2015) and planning for a long-term business strategy, I have tweaked it a bit to fit my project a little more. Since my end goal is just a (high fidelity) prototype and deliverables such as written and visual documentation, the Implementation phase, for me, is more about refining my final prototype to be ready for the exhibition and the assignment submission. Not quite as exciting as launching my design into the real-world but still something to look forward to nonetheless. 

First on my agenda this week was getting my conversation starter cards (now called Kōrero cards) ready to be sent off to be printed. This was at the top of my to do list because it’s a time sensitive task. I want to make sure I have the cards printed well ahead of time so I can laser cut them and include them in my final prototype. Admittedly, as I write this blog post at the end of the week, I still haven’t quite finished them but I will hopefully be sending them out mid next week! I’m well aware that the coming weeks will be super, super hectic and I’m determined to not make postponing deadlines I set for myself a habit. 

The main reason why I have yet to finish the cards is because I haven’t quite finalised the branding of my project. Obviously I want the branding of the cards to feel very consistent with the rest of the toolkit and that’s just a little bit difficult to do when I know I might be making changes to the branding later on. It is a lame excuse, I know, worst comes to worst I’ll just reprint them albeit last minute. I have saved countless inspiration pins to my Design Capstone Pinterest board and I think I should just sit down and start creating instead of thinking about all the different possible looks and feels the branding could have. 

To help inspire me to develop the branding more, I started thinking about what I wanted on the outside of the toolkit box. This would arguably be the most important part of the toolkit’s branding because it is what immediately catches the eye. I knew I was going to overwhelm myself if I went into it immediately trying to come up with a pretty design, so I just started by writing the words I roughly wanted on each side. 

This was really helpful because it helped me visualise how text heavy each side would be and to start thinking about possible layouts and text placement. 

Likewise for the facilitator’s guide, since I had written the content last week, this week I could similarly play with the layout and text placement. 

Honestly, it’s very bare bones right now but it’s better than nothing. As creatives, including myself, always say; trust the process! On a similar note, I also started storyboarding for my video submission.

In addition to all the, I guess, frameworking I had done this week, I also revised a couple of my tools. Namely, the Mahi board and the Actor Mapping flags. For the Mahi board, I thought more about the balance between the available tokens and the total number of tokens required to complete all of the goals. I did not want it to be possible to achieve every single goal so that it could prompt discussion about which combination of goals are more important. Furthermore, I also didn’t want there to be one obviously better goal combination. So, it was an almost mathematical question of how many tokens each person should be given to allow for the most diverse combination of goals. I drew up a board on paper and used representative tokens to play around with numbers and combinations.

‍

Using the representative tokens was really helpful because previously I had just been thinking about the combinations in my head. It’s been quite a while since my last maths class so it was not exactly the easiest thing in the world for me. I successfully decided on a total of 12 tokens available for 5 goals that require 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1 tokens to complete respectively. I’ll be testing this with my peers but so far, I think it’s a good set up. 

I also revised my actor mapping tool. Initially, I was going to set it up in the conventional stakeholder mapping way: three circles, moving outwards, labelled core, direct and indirect.

Although it is tried and true, I thought it was a little bit boring to just replicate such a common and basic tool. I wasn’t quite sure how to make it more tailored to my toolkit but I eventually had my lightbulb moment when I started looking at the different types of stakeholder mapping maps. In addition to the consideration of if a stakeholder is a core, direct or indirect, some stakeholder maps introduced another axis that plotted the stakeholder in specific quadrants based on what area the stakeholder held the most influence in. 

You know what else categorises things? That’s right, the Mana Kai framework (The Aotearoa Circle, 2022)! I thought it would be absolutely genius to be able to plot actors based not only on how directly linked they are, but also which category of the Mana Kai framework they were most aligned with or held the most influence in. I was really happy with the revelation because I was initially feeling quite iffy about the Actor Mapping activity but that is now long gone!

I was hoping I would be able to do some more user testing during Tuesday’s studio but it was spent mostly on video making. I will have to organise time with my peers outside of class time or wait until next week.

‍

REFERENCES

A screen capture from my Miro board of an iteration I created for the layout of the facilitator's guide. [Digital Image] (2023). https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVM1EOxvs=/?share_link_id=555568399592.

Tyntec. (2023). Example of stakeholder map where stakeholders are mapped based on how involved they are. https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.tyntec.com%2Fblog%2Fsecrets-building-stakeholder-map&psig=AOvVaw0_yKWVgiCEsqh2l5iCe33c&ust=1696237812794000&source=images&cd=vfe&opi=89978449&ved=0CBEQjRxqFwoTCICjnp3B1IEDFQAAAAAdAAAAABAR.

LucidSpark. (2023). Example of a stakeholder map where stakeholders are mapped on two axes. https://lucidspark.com/blog/a-guide-to-stakeholder-mapping

IDEO (Firm). (2015). The Field Guide to Human-centered Design: Design Kit. IDEO.

The Aotearoa Circle (2022). The Mana Kai Initiative - Purposes and values of Aotearoa New Zealand's food system.

‍

‍