IDEO - Method Cards

IDEO are a design and innovation consulting firm best known for their human centered design based approach. IDEO developed a set of cards, while not exhaustive, they help designers approach problems from a human centered point of view. There are 51 cards split over 4 ‘suits’ , similar to a set of playing cards. The 4 suits are Watch, Ask, Learn, Try. These cards are best used to explore new approaches to problem solving. They are called Method Cards.

For our Managing Design and Development class we were tasked to use 3 of these cards ‘in the wild’. Our first plenary was focused on the question, what is a system? Simply, as a class, our general agreement was; input, process and then outputs.
You can find the classes answers HERE. This test ‘in the wild’ builds upon on our learning from the first plenary. Focusing mainly on the human interaction with the system.

For my project, I chose the Laptop Rental System in the James Joyce library UCD. (Picture Below)

After choosing the technology I decided on the three IDEO method cards I would use. I chose;‘Extreme User interview’s‘, ‘Character Profile’ and ‘Try it yourself ’.
I will post my method and analysis on this ‘Field’ experiment shortly.