Designing Kyo, we have learned something new about a method of designing: the interaction one. We used Post-Its only to take notes about telephone numbers untill we met Gillian Crampton Smith and Philip Tabor.
When we started designing Kyo, we had no idea about how to bring to reality a concept about time that is far from concrete. But we found a satisfying solution that became an efficient prototype of our service. We learned a lot about prototyping: thanks to Till Nagel and Nicholas Zambetti we, now, have a knowledge about programming that previously we could not have imagined. We learned, not all but enough to let our idea run on MobileProcessing and let us hold our Kyo in our hand (by mobile phone).
Talking about our project we had the same feelings that President Barack Obama has while he’s talking to a crowd who is looking at nothing but him. Trying to learn about how to present your idea is an important step, because when you’re designing, you’re not designing for your own but for someone who you must show your design developments to. Kyo was an unexpected gym for that kind of exercise.
Asking what are you “looking for” to another IxD Lab classmate, rather than share with someone else what you’ve learned, was another important aspect of the design process.
Obviously, pink is not an amazing color to paint all our kyo experience with. What we could improve, but didn’t, was, perhaps, the connection between users through the Kyo application. We thought about how to update the “past” section of our service each time that a user uses it, but we had maybe not enough knowledge about programming, and certainly not enough time, to develop that section too. If we had had more time we also would try to improve the “comment” option of the “present” section, developing each possible kind of comment. It means, in technical words, coding the program in order to link the mobile device facilities (camera, voice recorder) to the selected comment input.
Time has been our main challange, in more than one meaning of the word.
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