This week we were joined by students in an organization on our campus called Design for America. DFA is nationwide and their focus is to design things that solve real world problems. I could tell the four students from Design for America were passionate about the work they do. Their presentation was well organized and very informational. They shared with us their design process that consists of six different steps separated into two categories. The first category is Understand which includes the steps Identify, Immerse, and Reframe. The second category includes the last three steps of Ideate, Build, and Test.

This was really interesting to me because something I have been struggling with is just trying to think of a product, and not start with the basics of identifying where a problem might exist.

After we learned about this process they gave us the opportunity to go through each step. We were given four different profiles of blind people in the Austin, Texas community. Each of them had unique problems and we had to choose one of them and come up with a product for them. My group chose Rose who was a mother who had a daughter about to join preschool. Rose was faced with the challenges of having to learn the new route to her daughter’s school as well as be able to identify her daughter in a large group of students. We decided to focus on the identification problem Rose was struggling with.

The first thing we did when trying to come up with a product that could help rose we had to identify things about her. This means writing down everything we knew about Rose. Then, we had to immerse and come up with how Rose felt about her new challenges and what she might be thinking. A few things we decided Rose might be feeling is nervous and anxious about having to find her daughter after her school day is over. After that we reframed and came up with how can we statements. For example, “How can we help blind people identify specific people in a crowd?”

After we went through the steps in the Understand phase, we moved on to Create. We thought of some different ideas about how we could help Rose and ultimately came up with a bracelet or necklace that both Rose and her daughter would wear. This accessory would ideally have a GPS system in it that would tell Rose how close her daughter was to her (similar to TILE which you can attach to your phone or keys to help you locate them). It would also have a button Rose or her daughter could press that would alert the other that they are looking for them. We then built what the device would look like using pipe cleaners and magnets. When we presented to the class it seemed like everyone thought it would be a good idea and they gave us useful feedback. One thing someone mentioned was to have a way Rose could call her daughter through the device.

Overall, I really enjoyed the class and liked learning about how to come up with ideas for designing a product. I plan to use this approach when deciding what object my team and I want to create for our final project.