Scanning the Periphery

For this assignment you will be searching for ideas that could help to improve a product or service. Your first task is to choose a product or service that you use frequently, something that you are very familiar with. It must be a tool, device, or process that you use for your profession, for a hobby, for home life, etc. Do not choose something that you are unfamiliar with. Do not choose a smart phone, computer pad, or notebook PC, etc. The product or service that you choose must be deficient in some way that is important to you. The product or service must also be complex enough so that re-designing it would not be a simple or trivial matter.
Once you have chosen the product or service, do the following: 1. Identify the product or service, and then describe its uses in general and within the context of your own use. 2. Describe the deficiency or deficiencies that you wish could be fixed. 3. Describe the key features and functions 4. Use abstraction to describe the benefits that you gain from this product or service (not the features or functions) 5. Describe the functions (not features) that you wish the product or service could have, and then use abstraction to translate these functions into benefits. 6. Use any resources available to you to “scan the periphery”, meaning that I want you to examine products or services used in other contexts (other professions, other kinds businesses, other hobbies, etc.) and identify two or three examples of products or services that provide the same abstract benefits (NOT the same functions or features, unless they are the same by coincidence). 7. Think about these products or services and how they are used in their own contexts, and then describe how a designer might provide the same benefits in your chosen product or service. When I say describe, I mean tell me what ideas occur to you that could suggest a design approach that would incorporate the benefits in your product or service. Do