Making Teams
Instead of deciding who will team up by ourselves, we started with an exercise. Everyone had to brainstorm one idea. Something he might want to work on. Then all the ideas were collected and we lined up in a row. Our place in the row was determined by the idea we came up with. If two ideas where close together we would stand next to each other, if not we would stand fat apart from each other. Then the whole row was split up in groups.
Initial field research
Since we didn’t know what our work was about at that point we just chose a very general direction which was roughly technology. To get used to field research we went out and just asked a few pedestrians about technology and their view on it. We then analyzed the data, which showed us that of course the the direction we went was to general. It was interesting though, that automation seemed to be something that people tend to talk about when asked about technology. This gave us a hint in a direction and showed that crowdsourcing an idea brings interesting results.
Field Research on Automation
From the results of the initial field research we decided to go with the direction of automation so we went to the ETH to ask people about automation. At the same time we started an online survey to send to people that don’t work in such technical environments and people of other ages and backgrounds. The questions we asked where can be found here: [Survey: (https://goo.gl/forms/8yYjRT847e35dtN93)]
Conclusion
We would then find out, that most people talk about automation in a critical tone. Where does humanity end up when things get more and more automated, how far are we already and when does it get dangerous or unnecessary. The initial idea for us then was to create a workshop which would give people the opportunity to create their own tool. This would show us a little bit more about what they think is unnecessary and what they would use if it would exist. So still very much coming from the idea of idea crowdsourcing this is a sketch out of Carlo Natters’ sketchbook.
