Where we left off last week, Sarah, Sophie and I had narrowed down the concepts we generated over break into a few storyboards and we had refined our design principles. This week, we continued generating concepts, as we each thought about what we wanted to work toward with this project. We know that we are working toward helping communication. Our research with second generation Asian Americans showed us some communication issues appearing over and over again:

-Communicating across language barriers and cultural expectations

-A desire to appear in control of their emotions, that keeps others at a distance

This week, we looked at a board game that prompts players to tell everyone what they would do in a given scenario. Here, Molly is told that she’s stuck in the middle of New Mexico with a broken down car and a dying cell phone. She comes up with three different things that she would do in that situation, and her family talks out what they think she would do. This gets families to talk about expectations and behavior without the pressure of a real life situation.

We had two ideas relating to a Family History Kit, that lets people investigate their family’s stories with prompts to ask family members about their experience. One iteration shows Nathan sending a Mad-Lib style letter to his grandfather asking for a story about a favorite memory. Nathan gets a letter back about his grandfather’s first job making watches. Nathan sends a letter to his great aunt next to ask her about school.

In the other iteration, Christine asks her grandmother to tell her about where she’s from. They investigate maps together to guide questions about what life was like for Christine’s grandma growing up.

Our fourth scenario shows a dim-sum dinner with questions printed on a doily under the plates. For each dish someone receives, they get a new question that they are prompted to answer and discuss with the other people at the table.

We struggled this week with when and where to add to ideas and think about possibilities, or to scale back and think about essential functions. We’re continuing to ask ourselves how we can push these ideas into something any one of the people we interviewed might benefit from.