In this project, you’ll proposed a design ideathat supports or promotes sustainable behaviors and practices for INDIVIDUALS in day-to-day use.
Focus
Waste products from food service and dining — encouraging sustainable behaviors relating to disposing of food, containers, wrappers, utensils, and other waste at specific campus location where food is served and/or eaten.
Design Thinking Steps
For this project, you’ll focus on these steps of the design thinking process:
empathizing - interviewing and observing potential users to understand their needs
defining -- identifying several potential problem / opportunity spaces and developing point of view statements for each space
ideating - brainstorming and generating potential solutions for your selected point of view and minimal viable product definition
prototyping -- creating your first, very rough prototypes of the essential product features to explore and illustrate the user experience and functionality of your proposed design
testing - observing as other students test your design prototypes, then iterating and refining your design ideas
sharing -- by presenting your prototypes, design thinking steps, and your evaluation of the effectiveness and impact of your proposed design
Workflow / Steps in the Process
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Step 1: Empathizing
Observe others, interview them, and try to understand the challenges and opportunities to improve their sustainable behaviors in their day-to-day activities.
Meet with your studio colleagues to compare notes about what you’ve found and discuss common themes that you’ve observed or noted in interviewing others about their needs.
Create 3 different Composite Character Profiles that capture the essential characteristics of specific subsets of the people that you’ve observed or interviewed -- especially the characteristics that help you define and understand their specific needs.
Use your Composite Character Profiles to define 2 to 3 potential Point of View (POV) statements for each character - reframing a design challenge into an actionable problem statement that will launch you into generative ideation.
Your POV statements should have the form:
[USER] needs to [USER’S NEED] because [SURPRISING INSIGHT]
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Step 3: Ideating
Ideate about potential ways to meet the needs identified
Brainstorm about potential solution alternatives:
Thinking broadly to uncover alternative approaches to address the needs identified in your POV statements.
Grouping and focusing to synergize the most promise ideas.
Define your Minimal Viable Product (MVP)
“A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is the smallest thing you can build that delivers customer value (and as a bonus captures some of that value back)”.
This article provides several good tips for identifying your MVP.
Plan the essential features of a first functional prototype that will help you get feedback to improve and enhance your product idea.
Focus on prototyping the user interaction and the essential functionality of your product.
Your prototypes don’t have to be super fancy or high tech as long as you can mock up the essential functionality in a way that allows other to test your design.
Be mindful of what you will be testing with this prototype.
Develop your prototype based on your testing plan.
Does your prototype give you the opportunity to test the features that you’d like feedback on?
Can you find a way to test alternatives -- what works better -- versus a single approach -- yes or no.
Plan the essential features of a first functional prototype that will help you get feedback to improve and enhance your product idea.
