This week in class, we had students from the Design for America club on campus come speak to us about the design process. The entire time they were speaking, I was kicking myself for not finding out about this club sooner. The projects they were talking about sound like something I would have really enjoyed taking part in. I wish that I found out about this club my freshman or sophomore year, so I could have fully immersed myself in the work they are doing. Sadly, as a second semester senior, I am unlikely to join this specific club, but I intend to be on the lookout for similar organizations out in the real world to join after graduation.

The presentation was well organized and interesting, and the speakers- just students themselves- were knowledgeable, professional, and very helpful. My favorite part of the class was hearing about the different designs and solutions the club had come up with, such as the bear for patients with Alzheimer’s. I do wish they went into more detail about the solutions they came up with and the reasons behind them, such as explaining why a teddy bear vibrating in a certain way would calm down an Alzheimer’s patient.

The other part of the class I thoroughly enjoyed was when they walked us through the design process. I found it interesting that they said not to think of solutions at all in the beginning, but rather just problems that a person might face in a particular situation or in everyday life. I also liked that they gave us options of people to design for, and didn’t assign any group to any particular person; this allowed for the most creative ideas to happen naturally, as each group got to choose the persona that they most related to or found most intriguing.

My group chose to design for Brian, the entrepreneur in Austin who was worried about how his blindness would affect his commute to and from meetings with potential investors, as well as about how investors would view him when they found out he is blind. We designed a physical touch map, that Brian could feel his routes to and from meetings, using distance equivalents (for example, one inch is about fifty feet, and it usually takes Brian about twenty steps to walk fifty feet). We also decided to integrate an app into the idea, in order to keep Brian on track, as well as to alert him of possible changes in his environment, such as construction blocking part of the sidewalk.

What I liked best about this exercise was the feedback from the class after we presented our idea. There were a few things we hadn’t considered that the class brought to our attention, such as the fact that Brian may not need to be going to and from the same place for every meeting, so the map would have to include a wider section of the city than we were initially planning. It shows how important feedback is in order to design and produce a quality product that people will actually want to use.