WHY saturate and group

• Space saturation helps you unpack thoughts and experiences into tangible, visual pieces of information that you surround yourself with to inform and inspire the design team. Grouping these findings helps your team explore what themes and patterns emerge that may not have been obvious at first. Finding these patterns moves you towards identifying meaningful needs and insights that will inform your design solutions.

HOW to saturate and group

• Saturating your space means covering it with artifacts that connect you to your design space. These could be notes, sketches, photos, quotations, screenshots from websites, brochures, or other found objects – anything that resulted from, or reminds you of, your fieldwork. Wallpaper your space (or work boards) with these ephemera, including the notes from your story share-and-capture.
• In order to begin to synthesize the information, organize the post-its and pictures into groups of related parts. You likely have some ideas of the patterns within the data from the unpacking you did when producing the notes. For example, you may have seen and heard some things related to feeling safe, and some things regarding desire for efficiency. Within the group of ‘safety’, go beyond the theme and try to see if there is a deeper connection that may lead to an insight such as “Feeling safe is more about who I am with than where I am”. Maybe there is a relation between groups that you realize as you place items in groups – that safety is often at odds with users’ desire for efficiency. Try one set of groupings, discuss (and write down) the findings, and then create a new set of groups.

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