Video Prototype – Team 3

With KInspire we developed a powerful tool to help you with your team’s Brainstorming process, to get that one million dollar idea. KInspire is an AI assisted smart software, designed for people working in the creative industry. It was made to bring structure to disorganised meetings, to inspire your team, and to assist with solution finding along with bundling already found solutions to a focal point, in a quick but fun manner.
By simply inputting a prompt or topic into the app it provides multiple different design ideas. Each member of your team can then rank the ideas on their device in terms of innovation and feasibility. Additionally feedback can be given afterwards: what did you like about the idea? What could be done better? Do you have any other suggestions for improving on the idea itself? Based on the ranking and the provided feedback kInspire adjusts and improves the ideas. After any number of reiterations you get the top ranking 5 ideas visualized and can now start the discussion within your team. By clicking on one idea, KInspire offers the detailed view, showing precisely which aspects are in favor of and against the idea, packed with a list of datapoints and descriptions hiding behind every single one. Through countless re-iterations your idea can be precisely refined, which leaves you with the idea of your dreams every time.

The benefits of KInspire are more than obvious. Brainstorming sessions, be it the convergent or divergent phases in the discussion tend to get worse the more people you have. You might think to yourself, “well the more people the better the ideas and higher the creative output!” and you’d be right. In brainstroming sessions without kInspire however, these meetings tend to get out of hand. Not everybody can get a constructive word in, people get frustrated and the theoretical potential of everybodies brainpower summed up is never reached. kInspire eliminates all of those problems. Through AI improved ideas or idea suggestions, anonymous feedback, and the intricate but simple voting system youre sure to leave with the best idea possible at all times.
With an ever growing database and constantly improving AI technology, kInspire is getting smarter by the minute and is already blowing the competition out of the water. Fundraisers are not needed as we have already developed the software. Advertising is not needed as we already have a strong, reputable and stable userbase. We already have a patent on our one of a kind technology so the question is not what are our next steps, the question is what are yours and what new heights are you reaching with the assistance of kInspire?

Concept – Team 3

Brainstorming has always been central to the design process. Seeking ways to improve its efficiency and boost the designer’s creativity, we asked ourselves, “How might we integrate AI systems to support brainstorming in design teams and encourage new, unconventional ideas?”

We began by sketching concept storyboards to visualize our idea. After presenting these initial storyboards to our peers, we collected valuable insights and feedback, allowing us to refine our vision further.

From this process emerged our app, kInspire, designed specifically for design professionals.

When a team gathers for a brainstorming session and gives the AI a specific topic, the system presents a set of ideas. However, it’s more than just a passive idea generator. Designers actively rank suggestions based on innovation and feasibility. This feedback loop enables kInspire to adjust and refine its ideas in real-time during the brainstorming session, leading to an array of innovative concepts the designers can then work with.

User Research – Team 3

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into the workflow of professionals in the creative industry is a topic of increasing importance. In this blog post, we will explore the benefits and challenges of integrating AI into the workflow of professionals in the creative industry.

Our user research consisted of five semi-structured interviews with employees from different companies in the creative industry (BMW, Struppler Design, PMMG Group, the other ones and K Traces Konzeption GmbH). The results show that there is a rapidly growing interest in AI among professionals in this field. However, there are also concerns about the reliability, ethics, and impact of AI on creativity.

One of the main concerns that came up in our user research is the issue of client data protection. As AI is used more frequently in graphic and UX design, companies need to ensure that their clients’ data is protected from unauthorized access or misuse, which oftentimes prevents companies from realizing the full potential of AI tools already at their disposal. Another pain-point is accurate prompt engineering, which can be time-consuming due to necessary incessant re-iterations and requires human intervention to ensure accuracy and even warrants outsourcing or tutoring in some cases.

AI is being extensively used in the workflow of professionals, writing texts or creating pictures already and has even now proven itself to be a consistent time saver and energy conserver for repetitive tasks. However, lengthy fact-checking still needs to be done by humans to ensure accuracy. This highlights one of the challenges of integrating AI into creative workflows.

The biggest AI-tool niche as of now remains to be a personal AI assistant or an AI integrated into others, with other tools at its disposal. This can help streamline workflows and improve efficiency, but toes into personal data security as well, if not more so.

In conclusion, our research provides valuable insights into the use of AI in the creative industry. We have highlighted both the benefits and challenges of integrating AI into workflows, and hope our research provides a solid foundation for the future work to come in this area.

video prototype – group 3

With our final product idea we decided to go for something more unique than basic apps, but also more risky in regards to user acceptance.

As a solution to our concluded insights from the user research, we wanted to make sure people are confronted with their water, gas or electricity consumption on a daily basis so they are more aware of it and maybe change their habits. 

That’s why we created “Triplets” – three (hence the name) pillars that can be integrated into your home, either as part of the furniture or as part of walls, that show different levels of ressources. These three pillars, one for Water, one for Gas and one for Electricity, either contain sand or use digital displays (we haven’t decided on that yet) to show your current energy consumption of the day. The more you consume, the lesser the filling gets. With the included software Triplets lets you set daily limits/goals as well. Furthermore, if you store electricity with a PV-system for example, the electricity filling will rise again. 

In contrast to apps, where you need to actively check your phone and remember to keep track of your consumption, Triplets creates an aesthetic everyday reminder which you can not disregard. Just walking through your home, doing daily tasks you can not avoid seeing your current resource levels, helping you keep track without having to remember to do so.

In the future there might be various adaptations of the pillars, such as a portable version for example, which would be a cheaper and smaller variant of the big monumental Triplets, targeting a larger audience. If we go for the digital variant as mentioned above, different designs could be implemented as well, making it more versatile for different homes.

Concept – Group 3

Completing user research and analyzing the gathered data our team created a variety of How-Might-We’s using the insights from the conducted interviews. By using different methods i.e. Crazy-8, SCAMPER and the 6-3-5-Method we developed various ideas in accordance with our How-Might-We’s. 

Based on user-research we found out monetary incentives are important to reduce the energy consumption of consumers. Since in our everyday lives the energy consumption is not obvious to the user we finally decided to focus on a solution visualizing the energy consumption of the consumer’s home

Our solution consists of three columns called ‘Triplets’ containing a liquid to visualize the respective energy-level. One column displays the water-level, another one the electricity-level and the third one the gas or oil-level depending on the heating system used. With this solution consumers have a better overview on their energy-consumptions enabling them to reduce their energy usage.

Scenario 1: Low water-level

Scenario 2: Increasing electricity-level

Scenario 3: Low gas-level

User Research – Group 3

In recent years climate change has become more noticeable. Especially with the recent energy crisis it became even more obvious that the transition to renewable energy and better energy management is needed as quickly as possible. 

As part of our lecture “UX3” our team of LMU students started to do some research and tried to gain more insight on this topic, performing User research with various companies connected to sustainable energy. 

Even though it was hard to find suitable Interview Partners initially, eventually we managed to arrange five different companies from various sectors, ranging from purely hydrogen – focused to real-estate businesses. 

In the Interviews we asked about general basic information about the respective energy the facility is focusing on, the goals and problems the company still has to tackle, as well as their recent projects and personal opinions about future opportunities and hurdles regarding sustainable energies.

In the upcoming days we will evaluate the gathered results, with the objective to develop a prototype of a product, which aims to tackle the disclosed issue.

Concept – Group 3

Developing a design concept requires creativity, out-of-the-box thinking, and great teamwork. In the following, we will sum up our team’s concept development approach. Throughout the information gathering process, we collected many ideas. For that, we used different tools like the 6-3-5 method to establish the ideas of our group members. Afterward, we decided on our best idea with a simple vote. However, we prototype our three best thoughts first in order to give every proposal a chance. Our emotional bonding concept stood out the most plus the feedback session gave us even more inspiration.

Our idea included a tangible teddy bear that could be used as a multifunctional communication device to accompany its user. The bear represents a connection between Sixt customers, so that customers could link up through the teddy bear and listen to the same music shared via the bear at the same time and many other cool activities to prevent loneliness and to share with their new Sixt friend.

Our next steps included developing a general plan for our video prototype. We split up our team into smaller groups and worked on different tasks.

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  Storyboard – Bonding Bear as a multifunctional communication device

Video Prototype

What is it ?

Our idea consists of a plugin tool for Zoom called “Zoomood”, that is aiming to encourage people to give more feedback, especially in presentation situations.

How does it work ?

Users, who are part of the audience, have the option to give anonymous feedback by distributing ratings on a mood-scale or pressing event buttons for concrete situations. Users, who are holding presentations, receive the evaluation in live-time and hereby get an overview of their listeners’ opinions concerning the current presentation.

Feedback can be provided on three different category scales: technical, content and style of performance. Furthermore, listeners can press the event buttons: “Slow down”, “Can’t see” and “Don’t get it” , which are meant for the cases of a too fast presentation speed, problems with the visability of the slides and understanding difficulties regarding the content.

Benefits?

Our tool is simple to use and provides an opportunity to give direct and concrete feedback in live-time. The main advantage is that the reactions are provided anonymously and therefore we set down the threshold for giving feedback. In general we can achieve a better understanding of conversation partners’ feelings. To sum it up we improve the situation of online presentations for both sides (presenters and listeners) and provide a better coworking.

Next steps?

In regard to adding new elements, we consider further event buttons, such as “Too quiet”, “Please repeat” or “You’re doing great”. Moreover, we would like to add an option for individual but still anonymous feedback. When it comes to the overall meaning of our tool, it would surely also be suited for other videochat providers.

Storyboard

Based on the insights we gained through our interviews, we developed the “How-Might-We”: “How might we add another dimension to video and audio chats?”. In the following storyboard, we present one of our ideas for communicating and transferring moods of the chat partners online:

This is Maria (an IT-specialist), who holds presentations regularly. In times of online work, she and her partners make use of the video meeting software Zoom to keep up with their presentations. When Maria asks for feedback, people are more reluctant to speak up than in live face-to-face situations. To solve this problem she proposes to use the new moodboard plugin tool “Zoomood”. As a consequence, she receives an overview of the participants’ anonymous feedback and hereby gets information about the overall mood concerning her presentation. This is why she can finish her webinar off with a good feeling 🙂

New work 3.0 – Bringing back social aspects in online work User Research

The corona situation of 2020 brought a lot of changes to how we work. In this context online work became more important than it has ever been before. As great as it is that it’s possible to work online, we must ensure not to discard the social aspects that we have known before.

Our user group are IT professionals, that had experience with home office before, but were pushed into full-time online work from home during corona.

In our interviews our conversation partners (as seen in the picture above) stated that they enjoyed their gained time with their families.

However, they missed conversations with colleagues not related to work. Furthermore, they felt like missing face-to-face communication complicates all work procedures. The overarching consensus was that today’s technologies and existing tools can’t transfer moods well.