Assignment Overview
This project came about as a result of an assignment from my Ideation and Prototyping class in which we were prompted to reimagine a product or service using brainstorming techniques.
The process involved choosing a question for exploration, then iterating on that question using a brainstorming technique. I have illustrated the process below.
PlantDaily Overview
PlantDaily is an app that alerts plant owners when their plants are in need of water, nutrients, or sunlight. The user will place a chip in the soil of their plant. This chip will attach to the roots of the plant and communicate the information to the user via the app.
Brainstorming
Question for exploration: What if caring for plants was more like caring for Neopets/Tamagotchis?
Initial Idea: What if there were a device that could tell us when our plants needed to be watered? Similar to the Tamagotchi/Neopet interfaces, our plants would have a health, hunger, and happiness setting that would send an alert as they needed more (or less) water or sunlight.
Brainstorming Tool: Dan Lockton’s Design With Intent Toolkit
I chose the cards at random by scrolling up and down on my trackpad with my eyes closed, and stopping on a random card. These were the cards that I virtually drew:
After each draw, I would brainstorm about the card I’d picked until I felt that I had gotten a sufficient use case out of it. I chose to organize (the word organize used loosely) my thoughts into a web:
Initial Sketch
At this stage, I decided that an app would be more practical than a handheld product like Neopets/Tamagotchis. I made an initial sketch of the app interface. Going into my digital prototype, I considered how I could incorporate influences from the Neopet/Tamagotchi in my final design.
Final App Interface & Features
Below is the app interface that I came up with for PlantDaily, along with a list of its functions and features.
The process of brainstorming definitely helped me flesh out my idea a lot more than I intended to at first. Every time I drew a card, I would think to myself: “How am I supposed to incorporate that into my primary idea?” I then narrowed down the possible answers, and eventually choose the one that I felt made the most sense.
As I asked and answered questions, the project started to feel more and more real. This exercise helped me thoroughly develop a simple idea.