Reflection on Design Challenge

The design challenge my group has been doing has been a series of ups and downs, loops and swirls, backtracking, turning around, screeching to a halt, then racing ahead. (To see an overview of my design challenge, follow the link here). Each stage has been totally and completely different and yet altogether the same. My team started out with me, Colton, and Nolan. Our idea was to implement more vending machines. How? We didn’t know. Why? Well, to get food to the people. What was the problem? A lack of food. Who had we interviewed? Umm..no one. Altogether, not a very put-together idea. Then we joined forces with the rooftop cafe group (Emmy, Mitch, and Brady) and our ideas as well as our presentation began more clearly defined. But, we soon realized we had too many ideas. We wanted students to have more food and freedom, we wanted them to be themselves and relax, and we still wanted the vending machines. Why? No one really had an answer except that it sounded cool. Needless to say, our first pitch did not go all that well. But in a way it went really, really well. Because we realized how disorganized we really were, it propelled us to do better. But, what really helped, was all the feedback from not only our peers, but the facilitators as well. Through out peers, we realized that we needed to improve our presentation, refocus our ideas, and get some more research. The facilitators feedback was feedback we asked for even after the pitch. This helped us to redefine our HMW, focus our group and get on the same page, and actually figure out how to start. After a bit of a rough patch figuring out what we were doing, why we were doing it, and how we could all get along and focus, (due mostly to the help of the facilitators) we finally got into the swing of things. Suddenly, we were researching, measuring, moving furniture, ethnographing, interviewing, emailing, presenting, planning, assigning roles, creating models, and collaborating like mad. We had gone from a group that said “Hey, we should probably work,” everyone agreeing that yes, we should probably work, half-heartedly working for 15-20 minutes, to a group that was much more focused, that would work then at the end of iDiploma, come back, share what we did, and plan for the next iD session. It really was a turn-around! Now, we have accomplished three interviews, redesigned our presentation, created a CAD model of our idea on SketchUp, put quite a bit more research backing up our idea, created a “To Do, Doing, Done” board as well as a weekly plan, and rewritten our HMW to be more focused and not as broad. Now, we hope to be able to implement some of our experiments in the next week or so to test out some of our ideas to see if they are “real-world” compatible or not.