Evaluation
Process Evaluation
Desired Outcomes
What were the main parts of the process which enabled us to reach desired outcomes?
The group gradually developed to become a team. In the initial divergence phase the different frames of references and different working styles lead to miscommunication and occasional frustration with the progress. It took a long time for the team to generate understanding of what sustainability means for us. I think that by focusing on local farming and agriculture we came to develop some level of understanding sustainability. The fact that this global issue is far from being easy to tackle as well as the multitude of “entry wedges” to tackle the problem, demanded lengthy discourses into the philosophic aspects of sustainable development. (Seb, December 2010)
By far the hardest part of group working in the initial phase was to arrive at a shared vision. This was impossible until we all identified and aligned our personal positions on the definition of sustainability. (Jonnet, December 2010)
Converging on a shared position on how we viewed “ensuring sustainability” was an important part of the process, it enabled us to begin to enter into a dialogue with each other for ideas generation. Although finding a meeting ground was at times a difficult process, consensus was a necessary step to progress. We each shared our literature reviews, project searches and personal experiences in an attempt to converge on a definition of sustainability. However it was perhaps the process of looking at how ensuring environmental sustainability could be addressed in specific contexts through action that enabled us to come together as a group and develop a shared vision.
Undertaking primary research through a variety of methods was also a vital part of the process, it enabled us to collectively understand the challenges of ensuring environmental sustainability within the chosen area of local farming. The valuable insights we gained from people, in all three user groups and from experts answered questions we had and more importantly introduced new questions and identified new problems. This activity also forced us to continuously reflect on and adapt our system as well as our process.
We can’t underestimate the huge importance of primary research to our project, both in gelling as a team, appreciating the seriousness of the problem and gaining a vision of the scope we have to create a real impact. Our process and product emerged directly from the ongoing dialogue with our primary sources. (Jonnet, December 2010)
Getting out and about and undertaking situated outdoor learning was also a very key aspect of the process, shopping for local vegetables, sampling local food and wandering around Lancaster city all revealed interesting observations and allowed us to gather further data. This increasingly happened outside of the group and blurred with our everyday lives and individual members were able to introduce new perspectives to the group.
Physical prototyping of the hand-held device, flyers, farmers info-sheets, maps, veg box and QR codes all helped us to test, clarify and communicate the proposed system to each other and to others. In hindsight it would have been useful to start prototyping earlier on. We also observed and participated in a user-led physical prototyping session in which a map of local food in Lancaster was drawn together with a local community group, identifying where they shopped and where they knew local food was available. This was vital to our understanding of how maps serve as useful cognitive and emotional artifacts in a community. It would also have been useful to extend this activity of physical prototyping to the client software, website and hardware designs. At a further stage of this project physical prototyping would be extremely useful when working together with users.
What are the main limitations of the process ?
I’m proud that we have achieved an unexpectedly high level of group cohesion despite our different backgrounds. Humour and social activities have helped us understand and get to know each other as individuals. The minor antagonisms in our working practice have been caused by a lack of synchronicity in the rhythms we work to, the way we tackle problems or our disparate expectations of particular aspects of the project. Frustrations have arisen when we’ve found it hard to tackle the required action points at a given time due to an imbalance in our skills sets or to varied time commitments of group members. Overall, we have accepted this as a customary part of the teamworking process. (Jonnet, December 2010)
On occasions the team should have been more attentive and patient in airing respective opinions. (Seb, December 2010)
Within the process there was limited time assigned to developing innovative ways to document the process, and develop a documentation strategy. Often one of the limitations of the process was that we went off focus diverging as a group, it was useful to see the IDEO slogan of keeping focused on the task. (Helen, December 2010)
