In the summer of 2018, I went on a 5-week program to Vancouver, Anchorage, and Seattle to study outdoor experience design. During that time, groups of students take on one project to study the design process in depth. My group and I planned and prototyped a lightweight, portable easel, and later a service model of combined guided hikes and painting classes that we called Easely.
I had previously taken both courses that made up the program—Experience Design 1, and Design Process Context and Systems—and found them to be really influential on me as a budding designer. I ended up being the oldest in the group of mostly freshman and sophomores, and I got to help guide the younger students through both the design process and their personal lives. I've come to think of the dialogue as my undergrad honeymoon: it allowed me to savor the pure design process without the pressure of grades and finals, and to get hands-on with experience design tools outside a classroom.
Our group, made of 15 students and one professor, was staying on a university's campus outside Vancouver, and we had access to their classrooms. On the first day, we started with solo ideation on a few ideas, which we each explored in depth, before bringing our best ideas to the group. We had to use four different methods for solo ideation, and one of mine was listed people and activities, then combining them.
One of these combinations was "solo traveler painting in nature on a hike," which proved plentiful for design problems. How do they pack their gear, then set it up? How do they bring water for paints? What do they paint on? I decided to dive deeper on this idea, and made a plein air paint kit one of my three final concepts.
After we all presented our ideas and put them on the whiteboard, we all coalesced into groups based around our favorite idea. Three other people liked the plein air paint kit idea, so our group was formed. As we brainstormed, the concept expanded from just a product to potentially a rentable service. Below you can see our initial whiteboard sketches and further ideation.
Now that we all had groups and projects, we went in depth into each project. We learned introductory experience design experiences to pull apart our projects into problems we could solve.
First we made a fishbone diagram, with the problem at the 'head,' and each cause of the problem jutting out from the 'spine.' Our original problem was that people don't paint outside, and causes included 'lots of gear needed,' 'weather conditions,' 'unstable or flimsy,' 'people don't have access to paint kits,' 'takes time to set all up,' and 'too heavy/hard to carry.' On the branch of each of these causes, we filled in potential solutions, like waterproofing, clamps, clips, and plastic cover for 'weather conditions.' The activity helped my group better understand all sides of the problem we were attempting to solve, and gave us specific answers to our problems.
Next we made a why-why diagram, where you ask "why" to your overarching problem, and answer with three problems , to which you ask "why" again and get three more problems. Our first question was "why can't people travel and do art?" The three sub-questions were "equipment too heavy/hard to handle," "people don't know all they need," and "difficult to manage." We then answered each secondary question with three more problems. From our one overarching problem, we got to 9 concrete problems, and this distillation helped us understand the biggest problems we were going to have to solve.
Our concept was starting to come together: a portable, lightweight easel that contained all the equipment necessary for plein art painting. However, as we researched what already existed, we realized that lightweight easels already existed.
Previously, we had the idea that the plein air paint kits could be rented as a service, but it stayed as an offshoot of the product. As our aim adjusted away from only the product, we came back to the rentable service idea.
We honed our service idea by going back to our original problem: people aren't painting in nature. People don't know how to start, and there aren't many options for plein air painting lessons.
Our idea for a combined product and service was plein air painting lessons, for which people could rent our lightweight easels. Below is the beginning of our combined product-service project.
Now that we had a new direction, we needed to analysis the relationship between the product and the customer. Our first step in that process was making a customer journey map. I was the person in the group with the most artistic experience, so I was able to make an ordered list of the painting process.
Below in the top half, you can see on the left side the first two steps and their details, in brackets. On the right side in brackets are the final 9 steps. In the second half of the image are steps 3 through 9, each expanded with details.
As we broke down the whole process, we got a better idea of all the variables we needed to control. Since our concept was supposed to be accessible to complete artistic beginners, we needed to take care of every preparation step for the customer. That meant the kits needed to be completely all-inclusive, and the whole process needed to be controlled by an authority figure. Since this person was going to both lead a hike and teach a painting class, we called that role the "teacher."
The next step was to look at the relationship between the customer and the teacher, so we made a customer-teacher experience map. First we made a chart for each person at every step, then as patterns emerged, we sketched a diagram to show their proximity during each of the steps. The last part was a rough sketch showing the location of each step.
This activity helped us understand all the steps of our full interaction, as well as the relationship between the teacher and the customer at each step. After we charted that all out, we were able to see the pattern of proximity between the customer and the teacher, and that coalesced into our next map: a "range of engagement."
Starting at the top left and moving down, the engagement passes through the four stages. At the top is "Engage," which includes learning about our service, deciding to participate, signing up, and payment. Then "Base," which represents a lodge or home base, and includes arrival, collecting your kit, meeting up with tour guide, and departing. In "Hike," the guide leads, the group takes breaks, and they arrive. In "Paint," we broke the process down into three substages: "Kit" (setting up), "Prep" (preparing to paint) and "Paint." The level of engagement has extended through all the stages, and reverses direction as the guide directs the group to stop painting and start cleaning up. The engagement reverses—they hike down, return their kits at the base, and depart.
We had expanded our service, and next we needed to focus on our product—specifically, the risks and the physical properties. We identified four main areas of risk from our portable, lightweight easel: the audience (users), environmental damage, portability, and usability. These, with their details, are found below on the left side. On the top right is a list of potential solutions, like biodegradable paint, a lockable water container, and wheelchair accessible settings. Below that is a list of next steps.
After the risk assessment, we had a better idea of the physical properties our easel needed. We began by thinking of all the physical characteristics, like the height of the easel, the grip shape, and backpack structure. As we centered the product on usability across age and skill groups, we included accessibility characteristics, like safe guards against collapse, reach ranges, eye levels, and wheelchair distance measures.
In the image after the one below, I've sketched a concept for the adjustable legs of the easel. Four settings, A through D, would correspond to generic height ranges: handicapped, child, woman, and man. (For the record, I do not subscribe to height-based gender norms, but it was the easiest to convey at the time. Future versions would hopefully find a more neutral way to demarcate height ranges.)
To make our first physical prototype, my group and I tracked down a lightweight easel in a Vancouver art supplies store. I volunteered to pay for it because I wanted to keep it after the dialogue for my own backpacking-artist needs. We made rough cardboard pieces—a segmented back for the canvas, and a platform for brushes and paint. Everything was held together and attached to the easel with dental floss.
The easel we bought came in a zippered bag with a handle, so our cardboard prototype pieces were made to roll up around the easel in the bag.
The first group testing was done in a hostel in Anchorage. We had to do it in the kitchen because it was the biggest space available, and everyone needed tables. My group and I had bought multiple paintbrush sets and paints for everyone to use, and we wrote a rough script. We distributed all the supplies, and I led the group through the exercise. We did a basic, abstract painting because we wanted to make sure the structures all worked before we introduced complexity. Besides having to share resources, the first round of testing was a success.
The second group testing was done while we camped near Victoria on Vancouver Island, and that whole camping trip was a learning experience for everyone involved. We lacked resources, and the script we wrote disintegrated as the group dynamic shifted. Some people needed more help, and some completely did their own thing. While not as successful as we had hoped, the second round of testing showed us that we needed to accommodate a range of skillset even within the skill-level specific classes. It would be good to have two guides: one main one, to lead the group, and one assistant to help individuals.
As the dialogue came to an end, our final step was to think about our design in the future. What would it look like in 5 years, or 25 years? There were many other questions to ponder: What are the positive views and negative views? How has changing technology or society affected it? What does the design look like, and who uses it? Has the need for it changed? Are there new opportunities for it? Is the design obsolete? How could you stop that from happening?
I found the design fiction way more helpful than I had expected. It was very helpful to identify the specifics of what success means for the product, because it hones your concept down to what really matters. You finally realize where you want to end up, and you see what it will take to get there.
The last assignment for our group project was to think about interest curves, which is a graphical representation of the experience of using a product. The first part, called the hook, is a sharp spike that ends slighter higher than it started. The second part is full of shallow rises and falls; these are the lesser trials, and they end at a much higher level than they start. The last part rises to a peak before falling down to the middle range.
For Easely, the curve is split in two halves, separated by the passage of time. The first half's hook is learning about the existence of Easely, and the lesser trials are picking out the classes and signing up. The second half builds to a hook, which is the hike, before you go through the peaks of arriving and setting up, then starting to actually paint. The fall is stopping paint, cleaning up, and hiking down.
Besides having tons of fun on this dialogue, I also really enjoyed the evolving design process for our project. I was pleased with the progression of my original ideation, and I think the concept is strong—although perhaps not in a post-pandemic world.
I think I could move the concept forward based on both my personal artistic experience and my outdoor experience. All the ingredients are here: I still have the lightweight easel, I now have access to a lasercutter, I have a stupid amount of art supplies, I live near the mountains, and I have a lot of unanswered questions. Would it be possible to make the platform flat, for watercoloring? Could I lasercut a paint/water platform out of wood? Would a counterweight system with a water container work to ground the easel? As soon as spring rolls around, you can find me outside with my new lightweight easel, conducting tests.
