This week was full of research, but also a bit of fun. We went to Eindhoven to the E-Fitzone over there. The E-Fitzone is a place where games and physical activity collide. It has an interactive physical activity space where you can play games, while also getting physical activity. Perfect for our research and a bit of stress relieve.
We met with Arkaitz, a Spanish employee of the E-Fitzone, who showed us all of the instruments they had. Of course we played all the machines. We started with an interactive floor and moved on to Dance Dance Revolution, Downhill biking simulator, real life biking simulator, rowing simulator, ice skating simulator, snowboarding simulator and we ended with a reaction game. We thought that especially the interactive floor was supercool, it made us do an activity without thinking about it. We were too busy trying to avoid a bouncing ball, for example.
In the end we spoke to Carla Scholten, who is the CEO of the E-Fitzone, about our project and the games we played. We got some interesting information from her, which we can certainly use in our project. She told us for example that adults mainly like to do the games which are fun but also give them a certain kind of feedback, while kids only mind about it being fun.
On Wednesday we finally had a moment away from our desk and had a first look into the concepting phase! It was was the idea generation workshop by the wonderful Charlie Mulholland, with the goal of thinking of 100 ideas which can be the possible solution to our problem. He started by removing all the barriers in our minds to a good brainstorm (no ideas are bad ideas in a brainstorming session and generating ideas is not just about being inspired at that moment, for example). Instead of writing about our problem definition, we had to draw it. After some exercises we had to come up with ideas to make our target group become more physically active. We had lots of different ideas! Some were a bit strange, especially after getting the assignment of making something bigger, things like taking your grandma for a walk became carry your grandma around. We feel like a number of good ideas are there as well. Now it is just a matter of organizing them in themes, choosing the good ones and generating more ideas if needed. We will combine different ideas and hopefully we will come up with the perfect idea in the end!