Our current experience as university students is unprecedented and has created a plethora of unexpected challenges for us to deal with. In this project we have taken upon one of the obstacles students of many design, arts and architecture courses have seen themselves facing: How can I produce high fidelity prototypes and models from home? Access to a workshop space is vital. In our work in progress, we explore how we can bring the workshop home, while at the same time carrying out our design process roleplaying as a design studio.

In this design challenge we were tasked with looking back at our time during the first lockdown of 2020 to explore the activities we did differently during the period. Having undertaken a project about self-improvement activities for a different age group in the past, we were curious to find an area we could improve for others as well as myself. Through our research we analysed our own behaviours and plotted daily activities on a user journey map which helped us hone into the area I we had found of interest.

To begin our project, we started by undertaking a research sprint and got to grips with existing solutions within the prototyping market space. This was important as we felt it was a key strength to go to our first client meeting armed with subject area knowledge, and a point of reference for some industry norms. Under our discovery phase of the project, we collated a series of questions we wanted to ask our client and established what the project groups aims were and how we wanted to achieve these.

After our initial client meeting, we moved into the creation phase of the project. This section was heavily focussed on producing various solutions derived from the specification we put together from the client’s wishes. Our creative sessions involved using an agile methodology, thus we used multiple design sprints to rapidly and effectively create and evaluate design propositions.

The ideas generated during our design sprints were categorised into two design pathway of Strategies and  Solutions. These two design pathways were born from the client interviews we conducted and from the information we collated at the end of our discovery phase.

The strategy design sprint was focussed on the creation and execution of plans of action around social media, marketing, community engagement and creating a recognisable brand identity, all of which the client had expressed were areas they wanted to explore and diversify in. The second direction our design sprint took us was exploring solutions that encapsulated the plans created during the strategy sprint. A solution specification was created from the client meeting notes and comments that had been made during the course of our various discovery phases.

We undertook a final design retro to create a final proposition that all aspects of the design team were happy with, and to produce a unified narrative to present to the client upon our final meeting.