Energy Poverty: Prototype

Learning Goals

1. Students collaboratively build low fidelity prototypes and identify a test variable for each prototype.

2. Students develop an activity to allow participants to experience energy poverty and empathize.

General Description

Prototyping is getting ideas and explorations out of your head and into the physical world. A prototype can be anything that takes a physical form – be it a wall of post-it notes, a role-playing activity, a space, an object, a physical or digital model, an interface, or even a storyboard. The resolution of your prototype should be commensurate with your progress in your project. In early explorations keep your prototypes rough and rapid to allow yourself to learn quickly and investigate a lot of different possibilities.

This project has two major components: 1) develop an activity/exercise that allows participants to experience and empathize with issues similar to those that their user faces, and 2) some device or design component that helps alleviate an energy poverty issue or concern for their user.

Resources

• Prototype Worksheet (Student Worksheet)

Activity 10 - Low Fidelity Prototyping

1. Remind students of the challenge requirement of available materials then show them the information below on prototyping.

Give students a time limit (suggested 30 minutes) to define their low fidelity prototypes. Remind them and re-remind them that this is not the real thing so they can sketch or make fake versions of their concepts. If they are really in to it and need a little more time give them an extra 5 to 10 minutes.

It may be beneficial for this phase to include some physical prototyping. Rapid physical prototyping of ideas can be done with simple materials such as cardstock, tape, glue, and other materials readily available in the classroom. Since some of these physical models may not be durable enough for preservation until the end of the project students should consider archiving them digitally, perhaps with photos or video. These prototypes should still be captured in their EDPL and the testing documentation can be minimal or even omitted.

1. Developing an Activity

You are going to ask the students to develop an activity that allows participants to experience the energy poverty concern that they have chosen to address with their project. This should not be a difficult addition based on their work in the Understand portion of the project.

An example activity that isn't as energy related and can serve as guidance might be a situation where the user must walk several miles each day to collect potable water for drinking and cooking and their product is a way to transport water and simultaneously charge a battery that runs a small, connecting water pump back at home while they walk. The activity might be asking the participants, other students in their school or class perhaps, to only use one water source at the far end of campus for an entire day or a week. Or maybe they set up relay race teams in a competition where they must carry water one person at a time for quite some distance, around a track perhaps, in an open bucket and the team that has collected the greatest volume before the time limit expires.

Once developed they should run their activity with at least one test group and use their observations and test subject feedback to improve the activity and its delivery. The activity plan should be well developed when executed and the group should have a plan for soliciting user feedback in some tangible and uncomplicated manner. Using their experience and user feedback they should plan and document any updates they intend to implement on their next run of the activity. Ideally they might run their activity again with another test group to show iterative improvement but documenting their results and planned modifications may also be sufficient depending on your timeline and learning goals.

2. Developing a Product

Based on the results of the information that the students have compiled about their user they are going to create and prototype some device that is intended to help alleviate some energy poverty issue that the user faces. As an example for you consider a school student in an energy impoverished area that cannot study at night because they cannot afford candles and do not have electricity. But the student walks three miles each way to and from school every day. So the product is a rugged, wheeled backpack that generates electricity to charge a small battery pack that powers a built in light and a charging port for small, 5V devices such as mobile phones.

Groups may need some guidance and feedback during this process. Once they have an idea one class activity might be setting up a cross-group feedback session where two students from each group meet with two students from another group. Each group uses eight minutes each to pitch and solicit feedback: three minute pitch, three minute Q&A, two minutes to receive constructive feedback. Bring them back and switch groups one more time, each group being crossed to a new group for feedback.