3 week project | Jason Dionisio and Maria Bowman | March 2022
The objective of this project was to create a disruptive new system for recommending books at public libraries. In a team of two, Jason Dionisio and I came up with So What, a tool for easy reviews and summaries.
This project also focused on the use of iterative and idea based research techniques, which we utilized to find our final solution.
This is Divergent Scenarios iterative research. In this technique we used a comparative process to drive unusual iterations. We used sets of two axis with categories such as Citizen VS Expert sourced or Virtual VS Physical. These sets of two forced us to stretch to iterate within the constraints of each overlapping axis, making for more interesting and unique ideas.
A second research tool we used was called Perspective Shift, a tool created by Dr. Sebastian Proulx. This works off the concept that different perspectives of the world value different things, so we used these perspectives to look for what qualities were important to us.
So What: An easy way to understand qualitative recommendations
Our system is made as a touchpoint in the experience of browsing in the library.
In our system, there is physical display board in the library that is able to display a four catagory break down of any book that the user scans, giving a single word description for that book's fufillment of that catagory. The catagories are based on what might describe the book best.
See here a user scanning a book to understand it better.
