DESIGN THINKING
Organisation
The MIT Sloan School of Management is a leading US business school.
Program/Project
Mastering Design Thinking is a 3-month course, aimed at practicing professionals. It concluded with a group project, to generate then iterate an innovative design idea, using a Design Thinking approach.
Our design idea was a labeling system for food products, with a color-coded system for freshness, and a built-in RFID tag for retailer stock control and “smart refrigerators”. The primarily goal was reduced food waste.My Role
I worked on a team with four other professionals:
> a Global Operations Manager from Tiffany, Inc., based in New York, USA
> a User Experience Designer from Amazon AWS, based in Seattle, USA
> a Change Manager from Zurich Insurance Group, based in Zurich, Switzerland
> a Design Manager from a web consultancy, based in Lausanne, Switzerland
> a Global Operations Manager from Tiffany, Inc., based in New York, USA
> a User Experience Designer from Amazon AWS, based in Seattle, USA
> a Change Manager from Zurich Insurance Group, based in Zurich, Switzerland
> a Design Manager from a web consultancy, based in Lausanne, Switzerland
To maximize our experience, we agreed to rotate the Team Lead role, each owning this for 2-3 weeks.
The course was designed for remote attendance, with heavy use of Skype, WhatsApp, Google Docs and similar tools. I arranged to meet one of the other team members in person in New York, which really helped.My Responsibilities
We all worked on all phases of the group project, including:
> identification of customer needs – using 1-to-1 Contextual Interviews, in potential users’ homes
> concept generation and selection
> several cycles of prototyping/refinement
> patent review
> financial analysis of options (NPV, DCF, sensitivity analysis)
> DFE (Design for Environment) research
> business case presentation
> identification of customer needs – using 1-to-1 Contextual Interviews, in potential users’ homes
> concept generation and selection
> several cycles of prototyping/refinement
> patent review
> financial analysis of options (NPV, DCF, sensitivity analysis)
> DFE (Design for Environment) research
> business case presentation
Challenges & Opportunities
Our team had never previously known each other, and all had different professional backgrounds.
We resisted a common temptation to “build an app”, instead moving outside our comfort zone to look at a tangible product, and its service implications.
Initially, we found it hard to let go of a solution-focused approach, then probably went too wide with our creative concept generation, but we did then iterate down to a design idea that we could all agree on.
Snapshots from our final team presentation