This project was worked on during the time of design project 1 which had the umbrella theme of 'Culture and Communication'. However Microsoft chose National Institute of Design as a participant for their annual international design challenge for MSR Design Expo 2013. This meant that we would have to combine our theme with the microsoft brief and come up with a solution that suits both worlds.
Brief: Making data Useful: Improving your life, community and world (more info)
Brief: Making data Useful: Improving your life, community and world (more info)
We broke the work into 3 phases: Explore, Conceptualise and Prototype.
The 'Explore' phase was mainly earmarked for coming up with a brief and we decided to sit and try to figure out which aspect should we start focusing on. Combining the two aspects of the brief was not very easy and we spent a good amount of time brainstorming before we narrowed down on the idea of using the 'Great Big Indian Family' and its inherent endemic information.
Have a look at the idea pitch we prepared for our Microsoft Liason.
The 'Conceptualise' phase had us doing primary and secondary research, ideating, brainstorming ideas and trying to narrow down to a concept.
Our path took us through various directions until we were able to finally fix upon utilizing the store of earlier ‘memories’ with new ones and renew sharing them with a close circle of people.
‘Roulette’ was the name of the application that we worked on during the 'Prototype' phase and it was finally presented to Microsoft representatives during the May 14th meeting. The Windows app architecture was chosen as it was the simplest to mockup. The application was planned to exist on other mobile platforms like iOS and Android.
As part of this project, we had to maintain a progress blog which can now be found over here.
