One thing I love about working with Jayway – if you have a genuine interest in something it’s easy to gather a bunch of colleges/friends dig deeper. This will be a three-part series around creativity and augmented reality (it’s in the title you know). Time to get started with some serious creative thinking.
Augment your life with HoloLens I – idea and planning
Augment your life with HoloLens II – showtime
Augment your life with HoloLens III – filtering
Background
Scott Kelly with HoloLens in the Destiny lab
At Jayway we have followed the virtual and augmented reality trends for some time and this spring augmented popped up everywhere with device plans from BMWs MINI and Facebook and other rumors as well. One company have come a bit further than plans, with a real device and an SDK – of course I talk about HoloLens from Microsoft.
So with all the smart people gathered at Jayway, how do we approach this? How can we come up with some fun ideas around augmented reality and specifically using HoloLens?
Planning for creativity
Ever heard of blank page paralysis? A blank page without rules often gets you less result than with strict rules and boundaries. So to get things started we made a simple plan:
- Collect insights and inspiration
- Build up the context
- Decide what creative methods to use
However, don’t let this framing and context fool you. It’s a way to trigger creative ideas, not smother them. Any crazy, far fetched and off topic idea are allowed during the early phases of the creative process but we’ll get to the ideas soon.
The first part is just collecting insights and inspiration, trying to get a little sense of the field of augmented reality. We check what others have done with HoloLens, look at other uses of augmented reality. Check movies and a few research papers. We also look at virtual reality and see if there are ways to use that in an augmented setting. Examples and inspirations come from many different angles.
HoloPortation, HoloGardener, TED talks, BMW IoT talk, gaming and of course film – you can’t talk anything holographic without referring to Star Wars and holochess.
Next up is to trying to sort out a few trends and insights from this material and also other inputs. This is to get a platform for creative process. In this case we settled with three trends that we named: the personal shopper, the daily commentary and the backseat driver.
As a side note, when writing about the daily commentary, we actually found some rumors about Snapchat creating augmented glasses.
For the context, we creating a little family; don’t worry they are not personas, that would have needed a lot more research. Family members are in this to kick off the creative process, not as models for interaction design. The family consist of a mom and a dad, two daughters and a granddad. There are also some contextual properties like how the work/family time and interests. Added to this we want to look at how they look at themselves, the family, work/school/social, and finally at community/society.
Last in the planning is methods of creative thinking. Since we are a crowd that know each other well, I was never worried about creativity or prestige with ideas, it’s not in Jayway way of working to shoot down each other’s ideas. The different creative methods are useful to switch the brain into various paths. For this discussions/workshop we settled on three methods; Association game, Trend tree and Lotus flower.
Next up will be game day – how we run the creative show.