As part of the Accessimap project, he IRIT-Elipse team wished to organize an ideation workshop, to explore possible scenarios for tangible interactions around maps. I designed a card deck using insights from my initial field study.
The cards
I proposed three main type of cards: personae, places and goals. Personae and places used structured data. The cards were to be filled by researchers, and used by teams impersonating "users" and playing out scenarios. These three types were completed by aesthetic, qualitative, spatio-temporal and ludic mechanism cards. This image picture the very first version of the card deck. We are currently building a framework and a toolkit to allow for use in another context.
Main results
Filling those cards encouraged researchers to reflect on, and to reframe, their definition of "the user," from a universalistic and ability-based point of view (i.e. "can see," "can partly see," "can not see"), to a more complex and nuanced description, including socio-cultural background and psychological traits.
The outcomes of the workshop are also described in the chapter Representing Children Living with Visual Impairments in the Design Process: A Case Study with Personae. We are also investigating how the use of design cards influence research practices on a long term basis.