High there — this is my Design Entrepreneurship project
Hi, I’m Monica Scott and I originally studied Design Management in Lucerne and since graduating a few years ago I’ve been working as a consultant/project manager in different agencies and companies with a focus on design and innovation. My passion is taking a holistic view of a specific topic — any topic — and using design thinking tools to redefine, take apart or create entirely new services/products by focusing on the user’s needs.
Within the Design Entrepreneurship MA Programme at HKB it has become my vision to challenge the stigmatisation of marijuana in Switzerland by developing a product/service that helps towards changing this perception and getting people to have a different connection with the plant.
The ‘big idea’ is that one day having a cannabis plant in your kitchen is the same as having a basil plant on your windows sill.
I’m doing it for fun, for a challenge and to have something to call my own. If it ends up in an interesting collaboration or a business that’s great, but for now I want to focus on creating something that gets people talking, that sparks conversations and slowly brings change into society, even if it is something just as minuscule as an extra herb on your kitchen counter.
So far the Design Entrepreneurship course has been the one to push me the furthest towards concrete ideas and although it’s nerve wracking and scary, it’s helped me go into a direction and think about solutions that I can start working on today and not just after I graduate.
So where am I now?
My favourite assignment was all about ‘future casting’ our idea based on a current article and placing our idea/vision into that framework in the future. I took IKEA’s hydroponic system in wired and starting envisioning a future and this is what came out of it.
And now what?
I got a few laughs and smiles from friends and family and for the first time it wasn’t just an eye roll about “Monica and her Weed project”, but they could actually see where I was going and that it wasn’t a dodgy packaging redesign for drugs. This finally got me excited again and the kickstarter idea started growing on me. Having previous experience in marketing, crowdfunding and video production, it also seemed like something I could tweak and turn into a project I can actually work on without involving too many stakeholders before being sure about what exactly the final product is. Also a kickstarter campaign is a great “proof of concept” and MVP that can be put out there to collect as much feedback as possible before creating a new service or product.
So right now that is the plan: a kickstarter campaign that puts marijuana in a different light and let’s you buy a plant or a pin just to support the cause.
What do I need now?
I collected all the ideas I have around the campaign and used the BMC framework to describe it here. Now I need you and your feedback…
What do you think of the idea? Would you buy it? Would you buy it for your mum? If so, why? Why not? What would you be missing?
Feel free to comment here or send me an e-mail:
thepotchronicle [at] hotmail.com
