In this 3-week assignment, I was paired with my classmate, Avery Caiazza, to utilize disruptive innovation methods and come up with a design conjecture proposal that reimagines strategies of recommendation in University or Public Libraries.
I first present to you the hero shot for our concept, which is an aesthetic wall of doors, cabinets, and drawers that allows people to choose which book they will read based on the external aesthetic they connect with most from the wall.
We started by identifying the opportunity at hand...
We then utilized the Divergent Scenarios Axis strategy of placing ideas into four quadrants to help one visualize where concepts fit within four labels/constraints.
Our Judge a Book by its Cover concept was very subjective and non-traditional, which seemed to work well with the disruptive opportunity at hand. From there, we were able to think further with a comparative analysis and come up with the pros, cons, qualitative attributes, and missing information within our ideas.
Next, we utilized the Perspective Shift method, which basically entails looking at an idea from six different lenses including the Civic World (concerned with equity), the World of Inspiration (Influenced by Aesthetic), the Domestic World (governed by tradition), the Market World (based on profit), the World of Opinion (which alludes to fame), and the Industrial World (with their biggest worry being efficiency).
By criticizing our concept through each world's higher moral principles, we were able to make decisions about what is most important, what to take away, what to push further, and what to lead our decisions with.
Then, we started to brainstorm and visualize our ideas.
In order to emphasize the idea of picking a book based on the aesthetic, we decided that the people creating the doors, matching books with the doors, and choosing the doors should do it based on the feelings and adjectives they associate with them.
We implemented certain features that would allow for accessibility, hierarchy and attraction to the wall.
Before reflecting on our proposal, we addressed some unanswered questions, concerns, and ways to rethink our concept. For instance, we could have utilized famous art already produced/well known as the aesthetics to further push the World of Opinion. Or, we could have put the doors on the ground as buckets, making them more accessible.
Overall, we concluded that recommendation is all about the experience, and for our conjecture, aesthetic is more important that efficiency! I hope to expand on this design conjecture in the future, and further my exploration of disruptive innovation.
