Praxis II: Friend-Safe Gate and Wristband System at Friends Daycare

Morph Charts - Diverging, Representing

Our use of a morph chart was ineffective for diverging, as well as for representing key functions of design concepts, because we used it too early in our process. After diverging with a lotus blossom, we decided to try to identify different options for various functions of our design concepts to create a morph chart, as shown below.

However, this morph chart did not end up being very useful for diverging nor for converging. First, we had quite a large number of individual functions, and two of these functions had a large number of options within them. This meant it was impossible for us to consider every single combination within the time constraints of this project. Thus, we did not end up using it to generate that many ideas in our diverging process. It would have been more effective to first converge and eliminate some of the options within each function, then use the morph chart to explore different combinations of that smaller set of options.

In addition, at the time of making this morph chart, our design concept and framing was not yet developed enough to be able to properly decompose the opportunity into functions. For example, the last row in the chart contains a function to "switch between open & closed states (if applicable)." This function was only present on some of the design concepts being considered. The last row was only sometimes applicable, which made this morph chart a confusing representation of the functions involved in addressing the opportuntiy. It would have been more effective to wait until we settled on a general approach or broad design concept first, so that we could then clearly define functions to use in the morph chart. Thus, in order to be useful, morph charts should be created slightly later in the design process, once the functions involved in addressing the opportunity are clearly defined, and once enough converging has been done to reduce the number of options for each function to something manageable.