Exploring how to make the pursuit of craft more accessible.
"Flare" is an initiative designed to amplify the creative potential in individuals, particularly busy college students. This product aims to overcome the barriers of time and resource constraints and provide opportunities for individuals to engage with and develop their craftsmanship. Flare is committed to helping its users find fulfillment and purpose in their craft, thereby leading more satisfying lives.
Creativity and craftsmanship are integral aspects of personal and professional development. They can boost personal satisfaction, create a sense of purpose and improve mental wellbeing. However, for busy individuals, particularly college students, harnessing these crucial aspects often falls by the wayside due to time constraints, study commitments, lack of inspiration and limited communities of practice.
We conducted a 7 day diary study with 15 creatively-inclined college students which involved recording their engagement with their craft and reasons for non-engagement, followed by interviews to elaborate on these experiences.
Since our study focuses on understanding the challenges students face in finding time and motivation to pursue their craft, we believed our results would vary on an individual level. Different people might find time for their craft at different times of the day, and our best chance of capturing these experiences was to let the participants record them on their own time. Diary studies would also allow participants to reflect on their motivations behind engaging in craft activities, which would provide valuable insights for us to consider during the design stage.
To further unpack the challenges identified from the diary study, we conducted co-design workshops combined with magic machines with seven college students. Allowing users to creatively design a product that would help them craft could offer us a lot of insights into how our target users approached creativity and what their main challenges were. Furthermore, because our research showed that engaging with creative craft is something that is very subjective to each individual participant, we believed that co-designing and magic machines would help each participant express what the best solution for them would be without constraints, and would help us develop our idea to respond to their values.
Through their magic machines, users had expressed what they valued when it came to crafting. We specified the following requirements for our design to fulfill:
Using the requirements identified, I started creating wireframes:
After creating some low-fi wireframes, I developed them into medium-fi screens that included all of the primary features:
Based on the wireframes, I developed a mid-to-high fi prototype of "Flare".
Although we developed a proof of concept based on our user research, there's still a lot more to do before Flare could become an actual product. If I had more time, I would test the product using autoethnnography as well as user testing, iterating based on what I find.
If you have any questions about our research processes or findings, feel free to contact me!
Under needed a way to ensure that their clients were able to communicate effectively with end users.
A feature that assists users in creating multiple different plans for 4 years at Cornell.
