I have chosen to complete my final project under the RSA student briefs 2015-2016 01 Creative Conditions. My project will persuade a change in behaviour at work to encourage new ways to work.
‘inAWay’ will be an interactive website to aid in relaxation techniques at work. I The past few days has led me to evidence that when people are not focused on a task or a problem it usually comes to them. My idea is to support the idea of doing nothing, to relax for no particular reason. This is supported by the researcher Johnan Lehrer in this video. Below is an image of the toolkit supporting links from the RSA website:
My target audience are employees in all sized companies. For my research I have interviewed persons over the weekend and on Monday, who work at small-medium and medium-large sized for profit companies. My questionnaires for individuals included 14 questions regarding how often participants leave their desks and if they would be open to having some free time during the day. I sat with each person as I allowed them to fill out the questions.
Yesterday I worked on research such as who is the target audience further by putting together personas. Personas are important parts of the initial stages to get an unpersonalised view of who could be using the product. This process was
I also worked on competitors and existing technologies. In the market place I looked for ‘Creativity Tools’ and ‘Productivity Tools’ on the internet. ‘This was interesting because there are a lot of products out there to help with stress and anxiety and some corporate tools to aid with rewarding employees and one good tool to help with training personnel. But my search came up thin on creativity tools – there are many articles that reiterate the same tips over and over but not a specific app to encourage the key points that are agreed help with creativity.
Mind Tools requires a subscription to use all of the features but a lot of their site is based on traditional techniques such as team building. Again refering back to Johnan Lehrer’s video creativity is not a condition that one can induce or formulate but a way of making connections between a series of events that come together to solve the problem.
‘inAWay’ will try to support the idea of one of these links, to allow the individual(s) to relax and have downtime. Another feature of inAWay is that it will have no reward system per say, free time itself will be the reward.
Some task analysis were also done of existing apps for sale on the itunes store. I looked at Self-help for Anxiety Management (SAM) which incidently is produced by the University of West England and not a traditional company.
My next task is to finish an initial design and start on user requirements to identify the key points I need for the application to be effective.