Thijs Rentier

This blog is about the minor course 'designing for one billion people'. It gives insights about the process I make through the course

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Citytrip zurich to paris

Small impression of the city trip with buddy Thys

In between Christmas and New Years Eve, we had 5 days to do what ever we want. Sunday two days after Christmas, approximately 4 ′o’clock I visited my friends house and we decided we wanted to go somewhere. As we where looking for cool places to go on Google Maps, we figured out we didn’t had enough time to visit any great places, everything seem to far or not worth the money, especially flights. Since my friends owns a car and we both have driving-licenses, we decided to go by car. “Lets make a roadtrip”, same story as we looked on Google maps, I really wanted to visit Kobenhavn but we both knew that would be to far to drive. Around 16:20 we realized we needed to make a decision before it gets dark and too late to leave anyways.  “We decided that it would care so much where we’re going as long as we’re going.”  As long as we were on the road in our car, going somewhere we would have fun, we said. Saying this, sounded very bold and risky, but as soon as we hit the road around 16:40 we knew we where right. We where driving to Zürich, without any plan, half packed suitcases (probably forgot the most important items), maps of Germany, France, Belgium and Switserland on downloaded our phones, a camera and a two skateboards, ready for 9 hours driving.

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(Off chronological post sequence) 

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Consult with a Marketing student

As soon as I told the turkish marketing student (whom unfortunatelly forgot the tame of) about my concept he gave me the following advice: Community marketing  “create your own community, firtst search a community that already exists,  then turn it in to your own community”

We had a conversation about the community marketing and why it would adjust my concept.

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Prototyping

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Camplife concept, conversation with targetgroup respondent

Questions about the concept ‘Camplife’ towards a respondent, who belongs to the target group Camplife aims on. The respondent works as an engineer in a company that designs and builds aviation parts, such as landings platforms for helicopters and lights and devices for airstrips. He works in an office designing these things. After my explanation about what the Camplife app is going to be like, the response of the respondent was positive. “Nice!” He seems to be enthusiast immediately. Yet he said, “But what about the weather, you need to have good weather to do this.” “And something else, for example when I look at some ANWB gift cards, for going out for a weekend, these things seems fun, but are never located close to where you are. These are always on long distance.” When I asked him how he felt about doing this with his colleagues, he responded actually positive about it. “Yeah that would be fun, as long as my boss is not participating it will be fun. … Especially with colleagues I directly work with” When I asked him if he would be interested in having their clients to join in the ‘adventures’, maybe to encourage customerrelationships he told me that he was not so interested about that. “I honestly wouldn't know which persons of our client companies I would ask to join, I don’t have direct relations/contacts with them. I would rather be more interested in having my own colleagues joining, I can imagine it would be really good for teamwork and stuff!”.

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Psychology on a Wednesday

Wednesday class started with a lecture of Marina. It was some sort of an question and ask session in where people could ask Marina in response to feedback marina wrote on previous assignments. The answers Marina gave were not only relevant for the people who asked, it was in general interesting for our processes. Coping was one of the things Marina wanted us to write down.  Coping can be defined as ‘dealing with things’ when I heard coping I immediately thought of the rail on the upper side of an half-pipe, which is also called ‘coping’.

  Marina introduced us also to a scheme called the Johari Window. Reflecting own your own behavior was the topic she told us about, how can be needed to have other people insights to reflect on yourself. 90% of our daily activity is happening in our unknown area and is happening in our unconsciousness.

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Relative/interesting projects

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rumpl/the-super-fleece-by-rumpl-the-perfect-blanket-for?ref=category

http://aasarchitecture.com/2013/06/exbury-egg-by-stephen-turner.html

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/therollinghomebook/the-rolling-home-book?ref=category

These are links to related/similar or just interesting project.

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Classroom Participation

On order to stay in trend of my project, I would have liked to make this assignment on real paper with real ink and paint. Not working on a screen could sometimes have much advantages. 

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Two concepts

Camplife

Calm Condo

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Storyboard & Concept

Scenario for Camplife (concept)

Prototype for Camplife (concept)

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Being bored

Popular NYC based film maker, about the most snapchats he receive from people.

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Sur-Fake

This research echoes the SUR-FACE project. It is placing the screen as an object of "mass subculture", alienating the relation to our own body, and more generally to the physical world. - http://antoinegeiger.com/filter/art/SUR-FAKE I think this perfectly describes what Douglas Rushkoff calls digiphrenia.

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Second protoype

My second prototype is made by the concept Slow Glasses. The glasses allows the user to have a normal view while walking and looking around. When the user turn his head down towards his mobile device, the glasses filers everything but the screen, the surrounding of the device turn dark so that the focus of the user is on the screen. In that way the user totally forgets his surrounding, it makes it impossible to both look and you screen and have an eye on the road (which isn’t a good combination). It that case, the user feels unsafe using his mobile device in public while walking for example, he will reduce his mobile use that moment to only what is really needed. For people who don’t feel the pressure and responsibility for their use of mobile devices while you are completely secluded from the public space you’re physically located in, the glasses are connected to you’re device. So when you try to walk around and you’re at the same time useless scrolling down your Facebook feed, the glasses detect your actions and try by buzzing an lightly vibrating to warn you.

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First Prototype

The first prototype I made was for the concept about a service to make it easier to go outside. The service comes in form of an app. Get more people outside, go in the wilds and break their stiff indoors focussed daily routine, by providing easy ways to sleep outside. Go camping for one night in the middle of the week, is something that can be easily achieved but what is not done very often. I want people to encourage to have more little adventures, and take an other perspective of your daily life.  In stead being 9 to 5 focussed, it can be really refreshing to look at the time around work, 5 to 9.  The app provides a map of your current location and show near places you can camp, by tent, camper or in a small house. It calculates your ideal route, distance and especially time. So that you won’t be too late at work the next morning after you’ve slept under the stars. It also reminds you of what kind of stuff and gear you have to bring. This app does the thinking for you, as much as possible. Plus, there could be an option to invite other people, friends or colleagues.  The first prototype was a bit small and unclear, I’ve made a second-one and added the name CampLife.

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Conversation with Marina

In a conversation with Marina, together with three other students we talked about our trends and directions. While she wrote down all of these, she summarized all of our concepts in one sentence. According to Marina, that would have been “uncertainty is the only certainty we have”.  While keeping in mind this phrase we were supposed to make our concept in to something tangible, by using Lego. The funny thing is, that I was really surprised and I wasn’t able to do something the first minute I had those lego’s in front of me. It felt like a joke and it was hard to it seriously. After I decided what was relevant for my concept, I just started ‘building’. While doing this, there were constantly ideas and add-ons coming to my mind. I builded a person in a room, while holding a cellphone, there’s one other person in the room with a weird costume. This person in costume wasn’t physically in the room, it was just some sort of funny video the person with the callphone was looking at. If the person wasn’t that focussed on his phone and all the entertainment on it, he could have seen some of his friends shooting a video campaign outside. The scenario was about some-one who is really trying to make the best out of his day, but handles in a wrong way. He kind of felt connected by watching weird videos his friends recently have liked on Facebook. That felt good for him, but it actually made more distance than connection between him and his friends. He was doing it wrong, he was using technology in a wrong way. Trying so hard not to miss on stuff, he actually missed everything.

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Research poster

This poster visualize the most important insights and observations made via an online survey. The survey can be seen here https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1fbKLbLuv35_CsyhCAptktra-ru9RNoZVhba_7bW5oRA/viewform?c=0&w=1&usp=send_form

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2 November presentation

Above you see the slides as shown in the presentation, this GIF image shows every slide 7 seconds. Insights presentations My insights presentation was about the insights and observations I did via an online survey, some interesting data came out. For example, people see themselves as pretty dedicated to their smartphones.  And if they could choose they rather are less dedicated than they actually are: “I feel like I’m missing out on stuff sometimes” There is a post on this item:  http://one-billion.tumblr.com/post/132490303721/research-poster Some other interesting observations I found were thoughts of other people who I found really interesting. Like the thoughts of Benji Wagner, which I wrote about in the following item:  http://one-billion.tumblr.com/post/132213983791/a-brand-called-poler-one-of-the-most-inspiring?is_related_post=1 And the thoughts of the media theologian, Douglas Rushkoff: http://one-billion.tumblr.com/post/132214394001/retaking-the-now-i-found-out-about-the-media Something other interesting was an art piece I found at the Museum Of the Image in Breda. It was an project in trend of privacy matters, made by Dennis de Bel. It's an device you can add on your mobile phone and allows you to instead of message people by using text, message using smoke signals like the native americans did. This primitive way of messaging, is an reaction to privacy matters along modern technology. For me, it seems also relative to some sort of slow tech in a funny way. 

Then I presented the first prototype of my concept. There will be an specific post on this.