Work-in-Progress!
So, I am starting off with reading a lot more about the design thinking process and looking up the IDEO methods Colin mentioned. I know my favorite product- my shoes. I am thinking along what impact goals I want to achieve taking my shoes as the starting point. I want to observe what impacts me and what would possibly impact others like me.
6/25 7 AM
I am awake. I’m thinking about what aspect of the shoe affected me the most during my run and squash yesterday. I think it was the build quality. Trying to dig deeper into that.
6/25 8 AM
I am examining the build of both my squash shoe and my regular running shoe. I realised that it’s always the switching from the running shoe to the squash shoe that sort of sucks the energy out of me a little bit. Making it faster would help. Also, my squash shoe gets worn out much more faster than my running shoe. I know it is because of more random and rigorous movements on court. But it can also be because of a structural design issue with both the shoes.
6/25 9 AM
I realised making things a bit modular might help. I want to define the problem as the unnecessary need for different shoe builds for different athletic purposes. Two areas where I think we can work on is: the grip of the shoe and the the overall feel of the shoe required for each sport. I remember seeing the design of laceless shoes that use like a knob kind of thing to tighten and loosen the fit. Starting to think about the design to make the grip more modular.
6/25 11 AM
I thought: maybe we can attach and detach different kind of grips using like velcro’s? Realised it won’t be right for sports. Zips may work, but I don’t think they would be appropriate for sports requiring hard soles. Maybe the zip idea will work for a light casual sneaker thing. I sort of circled back to the vacuum knob thing that may be used to tighten the shoe to size. Maybe vacuum seals can be used to attach and detach the various kind of grips using a toggle switch and calibration points.
Break for classes
6/25 9 PM
I looked at many ideas discussed on Slack and met many entrepreneurs in my class on Tech Entrepreneurship. I am thinking my idea of the modular shoe can also be extended to casual footwear or comfort wear as mentioned by Professor Ong on Slack. Maybe the grip is not the only item that can be modularized. I do not want to think too far into it because I want to fovus on my impact goal right now. I am trying to sketch my idea but I am bad at drawing. Let’s see whee it goes!