They/them. PhD student: smart textiles, weaving, computational craft, hardware hacking.
by Shanel
Reading response for Assignment 1: The Deep Dive, a video about IDEO, an influential design firm. Video link.
1. This video is about 20 years old! Which ideas from this work show up in today’s shopping carts? Which ideas did not make it, and why didn’t they?
Today’s shopping carts definitely show traces of the deep dive’s mock-ups, especially the ideas that were too “high-tech” for the time. While most of the shopping carts I’ve seen in supermarkets look exactly the same as before IDEO’s redesign, there are some special ones. King Soopers has modular shopping carts, not for regular customers, but for employees to push while they are shopping for online pick-up or delivery orders. The scan-while-you-shop model has been adopted by some stores as well, such as Amazon’s convenience stores.
The improved child seat notably did not make it to shopping carts. The mock-up’s prototype looked too unwieldy to manufacture. Also, the bag hooks do not seem to be a feature of today’s carts, which is a shame because I was totally on board.
2. Who did the design team talk to? For each group of stakeholders that the designers talked to, explain why it was important to talk to them.
The design team mostly talked to associates of the supermarkets. Among the associates, they identified several roles which would have different working relationships to the shopping carts, such as store managers and administrators, cashiers or other line-level employees, and security. The main user category that seemed to be missing was the shoppers, though that might have been video editing. Higher level employees of supermarkets such as managers and executives would have the financial and social capital to implement a new shopping cart design, necessitating their buy-in. However, managers can be strongly influenced by their subordinate employeees such as cashiers and security. If a poorly-designed cart made the cashiers’ and security staff’s jobs difficult and impacted their performance, (even if the manager doesn’t listen to their employees) the negative effects would eventually reflect upon the manager.