Tilo’s Reflections
This is my personal blog where I will be posting personal reflections on our Graduate Studio II Project.
Week 1
I am very excited for our largest and final studio project — GSD2, taught by Peter Scupelli and teaching assistant Katie Herzog. The course is connected to the Research Methods for Design course taught by Bruce Hanington. Both classes are part of the reason why I chose to attend the Master’s Program at Carnegie Mellon. I am especially looking forward to this class because it is held in cooperation with Microsoft which gives us an opportunity to directly engage with industry professionals and thought leaders through Microsoft’s Design Expo.
Each year, Microsoft Research sponsors a semester-long class at leading design schools. Students are asked to form interdisciplinary teams of two to four students to design a user experience prototype that solves a real-world problem. From these groups, a representative team from each school presents their work at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington USA.
— Microsoft Design Expo
Empathy at scale
For this year, Microsoft has situated their design challenge around empathy — specifically enabling empathy at scale.
After Peter had introduced us to the brief, the class got to tele-meet our two liaisons at Microsoft: Margaret Price, Principal Design Strategist, and Ben Boesel, Designer in the hardware team and CMU alumn. It was a great chance for us to ask some initial questions and familiarize our self with the somewhat open brief.
In addition to the Microsoft brief — Peter challenged us to incorporate the recently released IPCC report into our projects. Personally, I am very concerned about climate change and am glad to take the IPCC report into account as well as the 17 Sustainable Development Goals that were developed along side it.
Teams!
After getting to know this year’s topic, we were assigned teams: Aadya, Emma, Ulu and I will be taking on this challenge together 🙌🏼! We quickly decided to celebrate our team setting during a bonding dinner (the first of many, hopefully), discussed our expectations for this project, and drafted a team contract. I feel that we are all on the same page and am confident we’ll do great as a group. We
In our first official group meeting we started chipping away at deciding which direction to take regarding the rather open ended brief. It was interesting to see that while we had a roughly similar understanding of what empathy meant for us, there still where considerable differences. It took a while to align ourselves but now we have a working definition of empathy — a big step!
A much harder task was deciding on a general topic we wanted to explore during this project that is both related to empathy and the IPCC’s report. We each took time and thought about what they wanted to achieve in this project and prepared some directions to follow up on.
After an intense workshop we distilled our interests into 4 main topics: immigration and refugees, responsible consumption, mental health, and gender equity. We then ran through each of them and together as a group realized that immigration seemed to align perfectly both with the Microsoft brief (empathy) as well as the IPCC’s report. I am very excited to take on immigration and refugees in this context but am well aware that this going to be an intense topic to tackle.
Week 2
This week was all about coming up with a working definition of what we mean when we talk about empathy and converging on our area of focus. In Bruce’s methods class, we were introduced to territory and stakeholder maps as tools to build a shared understanding what this project will eventually address.
Empathy
In order for us to align ourselves and be sure we mean the same thing when we refer to empathy, each of us researched what empathy means for us individually. We then came together and shared our research insights and talked about personal stories. It was fascinating to see different stances and definitions. While overall we mostly agreed, there were some notable disparities. For quite some time, we debated how much personal experience is needed to truly empathize with someone else’s. Will I, a man, ever be able to empathize with a woman going through labor? Will I someone who has never felt hunger, be able to empathize with a person starving person? Will I be able to empathize with a displaced person or a refugee, as someone who has always lived in privilege?
Empathy is blurry — At the beginning of our discussion on defining empathy, I felt that I had a solid understanding of the topic. Yet, the more we shared our personal definitions of empathy, I realized that the more I knew about empathy the less I felt I truly understood it. It is a very complex and somewhat loaded term and it is often used incorrectly.
At the end of our working session however, we could all agree on a working definition. I am sure that my relationship with the term empathy will evolve over time.
Territory map
After we had defined empathy it was crucial for us to narrow down on our territory by crafting a territory map. At the beginning I underestimated the amount of work that would go into our map — it turned out to be a very complicated process.
Designing our territory map sparked many meaningful conversations. Who are we designing the intervention for? Who are the actors? What is our target audience? Where does technology matter? Our map helped us greatly in narrowing down on the scope of our project.
At the end of the day, I was happy the way the territory map turned out. It was a very useful element in our first milestone presentation. We received great feedback from the our instructors, our peers, and Margaret and Ben from Microsoft. Go team!
Exploratory Research
The next step was to conduct more research. Again, we agreed to do individual research and then reconvene to discuss our insights. We also made a plan to reach our to friends and family who themselves have immigration related experiences or themselves were immigrants, even refugees.
I am hopeful that we will be able to conduct insightful interviews with relevant people to better understand both the immigrant experience and the immigrant-averse mindset. A tough challenge!
Week 3
This week was all about reaching out and connecting with stakeholders. We conducted several interviews with people who are actively engaged with immigrants and refugees.
One of my best friends back in Berlin is involved with an organization that helps Syrian refugees immigrate to Germany. Lorenz spoke with us and provided valuable insights into work of Flüchtlingspaten Syrien. He shared many heartbreaking stories with us and agreed to forward emails, text messages, and photos that he and his late father, who founded the organization, had received in the past years. Lorenz will also connect us with the head of Flüchtlingspaten Syrien.
Honestly, this was very emotional to me. I heard such horrifying things about the situation in Syria and the incredible struggles refugees have to go through in order to make it to a safe country like Germany. It is hard to grasp the horror and dismay the people are dealing with we are interviewing. It is
One of our classmates, Ema, suggested we speak with her Mother, a Bosnian refugee to Norway who settled with her family in Australia in the mid 1990s. She organized a video interview with her for us.
We got to learn so much from her direct experience as a refugee and immigrant. It was especially useful to us because Vesna had very different views on her experience in Norway and Australia.
My personal goal right now is to build empathy for displaced persons and refugees by directly speaking with them and people who are involved with various aid organizations. But it’s also important to try and understand the background, values and motivations of immigrant-averse individuals. The problem is that it’s rather hard reaching out to such persons because I don’t personally know anyone on this side of the spectrum. I hope that we can try and build empathy for these individuals as well.
Week 4
During the week we conducted another interview. Jenny, a refugee from China who fled during the cultural revolution, agreed to share her experience with us. Emma knows Jenny since her childhood. Personally, I feel that I was more confident interacting with a refugee directly the second time around. I learned that it is very important to give the interviewee the freedom to walk us through their story on their own terms and pace. At the same time, we the interviewers need to steer the conversation in a way to remain relevant on our topic. This is quite a balancing act but I do think that I am getting better at this specific skill.
We also began synthesizing our research. It felt comforting to have had Pete from Philips in Bruce’s methods class talk about the ways of organizing our research.
Our team had different ideas about how to make sense of our research and I felt that it helped greatly to take some time before the synthesis phase and talk through all the kinds of synthesis approaches we had learned about. This led to a very important research artifact (matrix on the left). Up until this moment, we had disparate ideas about who our intervention was going to be targeted towards. However, talking though this matrix together, we build a shared understanding about the opportunities and challenges that each target group has. This conversation paved the way for our entire research synthesis. I learned from this activity that it is pivotal to be open minded about different ideas and approaches on the team and that it is important for everyone’s opinion to be heard.
Also, I have been trying and somewhat forcing myself to take a moment before tackling a task and think about all the different ways that this might be achieved. Before I tended to rush to a solution a bit using the same kinds of tools and methods but now I want to be more open towards trying new ones. I am really glad I have Bruce’s class to help me push beyond the tools I am already familiar with.
Details matter
After having gone through our research insights and distilling them into How-Might-We statements and design principles we needed to populate our slide deck for Mondays research presentation dry run. While all of us had worked together on building out the insights it was really hard to formulate them into clear and concise sentences and bullets. What surprised me here was that we were all in agreement about the insights themselves but had substantial disagreements about how to phrase them precisely. I learned that it is crucial to precisely talk through the wording bit by bit in order to reflect the depth about the previous conversations because some information might be lost in a carelessly constructed slide.
Week 5
This week, we had our exploratory research presentation. We got to test our presentation structure on Monday and received some very helpful feedback from Peter, Bruce, and Katie. Peter suggested we include a simple model to help our audience follow along as we explained our insights and our design principles. Honestly, I was a bit skeptical as to wether this would really add to our presentation. But after we tried our a few different versions I have to say that it did indeed helped anchor our research insights especially from a narrative standpoint as it felt easier to follow along and situate our insights in terms of stakeholders. However It was quite a challenge coming up with this model though. We first tried a linear approach but ultimately landed on a circular one.
I want to challenge myself to try and think in terms of such kinds of models in the future. It gave me confidence throughout the presentation and was something we could always refer to when answering questions.
From exploratory to generative
After the final presentation on Wednesday, we entered our generative phase with a workshop by Liz Sanders. It was a blast!
She gave us an introductory presentation into participatory and co-design and facilitated a quick activity where we got to experiment with different kinds of materials she had brought with her.
Our team decided to use this activity to plan our own generative workshop. We asked Liz for some advice. She recommended to have the participants visualize their experience on their own community. Naturally, all four of us began visualizing our own understanding of community. Easier said than done: We each had such a different take on the activity! Emma used photographs, Ulu plastic gems, Aadya paper cutouts and tape, and I used puppets and cutouts.
I learned that it is very important to define the types of materials to provide as they can guide the direction of the activity substantially. We need to make a plan!
Week 6
This week was heavily impacted by Confluence. Everyone’s attention shifted over to mentally getting ready and finalizing portfolios and résumés for the fair. We still got together and made progress on planning our generative workshops, going through our toolkit resources and getting our shape cutter up and running.
We decided to divide and conquer for Monday’s check in meeting during class: everyone is going to provide workshop materials for one section of the workshop. I will be making very lo-fi prints of various shapes and symbols. The goal is to get the shape cutter ready by tuesday so we can make some assets on our own. During Liz’ workshop we realized that these cutouts work very well. They have just the perfect fidelity to cover a wide range of meanings while not being to specific about race, age, etc.
Contact
This is a big deal: Ulu has successfully made contact with a self organized refugee organization in Pittsburgh! We hope to have them join us for a workshop by the end of next week. We are still a little unsure if it will work out in the end and if we will be able to connect with other local groups. That puts us in a situation of uncertainty since we are so dependent on external participants. I’ve realized that it’s so crucial being able to connect with people. It is literally what makes or brakes this project.
Week 7
This week started out with a disappointment, the Somali Bantu Community in Pittsburgh didn’t get back to us in time to plan a workshop with them. Likewise, it was quite a challenge to organize a workshop with local citizens like we had planned.
During this time I realized that while it’s nobel to plan out as much as possible in advance, you never know if it actually is going to work out in the end. We had quite an extensive workshop planned and we started getting maybe a little naive. After all, the problem we are trying to tackle is that refugees are somewhat separated from our communities. During week 7 this became especially evident since it was quite hard to connect with them even for us who are actively working within this space.
Our team decided to take another approach—we were going to run a couple of flash activities with the people we could get a hold of, in one case Ulu’s taiko group members, in another case we just went outside with a large board asking local Pittsburghers to share perceptions of their community. I felt a little stuck with the approach we had decided on before and these activities felt like we were getting somewhere, and fast. I learned that it’s valuable to plan out activities in detail beforehand to ensure that everything works smoothly in a workshop but that it’s also crucial to think on your feet and adjust to changes quickly.
As another type of strategy, Ulu crafted 4 distinct refugee personas that we conducted a role-playing activity in the studio with. I was very impressed with her work defining the unique personalities and stories. What I got from this is that even when things look bleak, you can make progress given the skills and resources you have. Having our foreign student classmates act as these refugee personas turned out to be very helpful and resulted in rich insights. We even came up with a term for this: hacking research.
Week 8
It’s kind of ironic—during our first and secondary research phases we had plenty of time to contemplate our insights, reframing our HWMs and so on. But because we experienced some unexpected delays in week 7, we really had to rush through our ideation phase. Personally, this felt a little unsatisfying because the ideation phase greatly determines the next half of the project. Right now, we are at the end of the first diamond, converging on concrete concepts and ideas for our intervention.
In total, we conducted three distinct ideation activities. I felt that the most successful activity was when we mapped our four refugee personas to four citizen personas we had decided to build out additionally. Having concrete personas to work with was super helpful for me. In our prior ideation activities it felt quite hard to come up with concepts but with this framework it felt much easier to empathize for both groups and generate ideas. I did not expect the persona cards to be as useful as they were.
I think that the feedback for our presentation was good given the situation. It felt appropriate to present a range of concepts rather than focussing on one or two. This made sense especially because we were going to finally meet the Bantu community here in Pittsburgh on Saturday and get first hand insights.
Meeting with Amanda Kennedy
Kristen Hughes had suggested we reach out to Amanda, an HCI student had worked within the space of financial literacy for refugees—she agreed to meet us for an interview.
Amanda told us something interesting: she had the same issues getting access to refugees like we had while working on der project. Her team subsequently decided not to work with refugees directly but rather gain insights through expert interviews and secondary research. She sold us that they were still able to gain valuable insights and encouraged us to keep engaging with organizations and institutions. She also agreed to send us her research!
Meeting with the Somali Bantu Community
Saturday was the day we finally met with the Bantu community here in Pittsburgh. The event was hosted in cooperation with an improv/playback theater group. The idea was for the Bantus to share their stories and have the group reenact their experiences in front of them. It felt a little awkward at first but I have to admit that it was very a quite successful tool in order to have people share their stories and then reflect on the performance. Many of the Bantus did not speak english and needed translation — this way of sharing stories through acting felt very inclusive and was able to convey emotion without much speaking. Impressive!
We also got to speak directly with the Bantus after the event. They told us about their struggles back in Somalia and here in the US. The community’s leader Awyes, with whom we had spoken before, agreed to connect with us again soon and also invited us to their next event in two weeks. It was a very successful day! I feel that Aadya and I were quite successful gaining trust on the side of the Bantus and hope to build a stronger relationship with them throughout the project.
However, while we were talking to the community I realized that the project timeline is quite short and that we’ll be done with the studio in two months. I really hope that we will be able to work with them during that time. They all seem to be very busy.
Week 10
Since the last check in with Microsoft where we presented our 5 ideas we learned more about the refugee experience and decided to revisit the concepts. I feel that we are slowly inching closer to better understanding our stakeholders experiences — we’ve met with other refugees and locals citizens.
Most notably, we attended a community event organized by the local storytelling organization Sharing Our Story and the Pittsburgh Playback theater group, with which we got to know during the last Somali Bantu community event. Both groups have been spending time with 10 teenagers in Northview Heights, listening to their individual stories and recording them in form of short narrated videos. The goal of this activity is to get the youth in the neighborhood to share their stories and relate to others’ experiences. During the event, the videos were screened and attendees were asked to share out what they thought and felt during while watching the stories. Their feedback was then acted out or played back by the Playback theater group as another form of storytelling. The 2 hour event was closed out by a local music and dance group’s performance.
While the event was certainly very interesting, we specifically attended it because we were told that the Somali Bantu community with whom we had met last week would be in attendance as well as we wanted to get feedback on our storyboards. Unfortunately, the organizers Sally and Sara informed us that none of the Bantu had come to the bus they had rented for the event. Not even Aweys, their association’s president had showed up or was responding to calls or texts. That made me feel really bad since Aweys had invited us to the event to begin with! I think that the Bantu’s experience during the last Playback event was kind of unpleasant and a bit unsettling and that the event had scared them off. This is really unfortunate for us since we had established a connection with the Bantus directly and independently of the playback group but now Aweys was neither responding to them nor us. I hope that we don’t lose contact with them but at this point it looks rather bleak.
My biggest learning with this is that we cannot really expect anything from working with them. One the one hand they have been quite responsive to us but when we make plans they often fall though. It’s so tough working directly with them.
Fortunately, Ulu and Aadya got another meeting with JFSC, getting great feedback on our existing concepts. This really helped refine them. I am very excited that we get to now think more concretely about possible interventions and are exploring ways of prototyping them.
Personally, most of us had a very rough week with many ups and downs but I really believe that we are only getting stronger as the project goes on. I am getting to know my teams better every week and I feel that we are getting better at working together. Maybe because we started talking about our feelings more openly than in the past.
Week 11
This was one of the most crucial weeks in our project so far. Earlier in the week, we got to speed-date our concepts with more citizens. Luckily, we had a visitor’s day on Monday and recruited some prospective students to test concepts with. It was great to get additional outside opinions as it seemed to me that these were most valuable to us at this point. Fresh perspectives!
Now that we had gathered more feedback from our varios stakeholders (citizens, refugees, and support organizations) we needed to make a decision what concept to focus in on.
Something strange happened at this point. We created an extensive matrix and posted up our evaluative research insights. Staring at all of this disparate feedback felt a bit overwhelming. But then Ulu began reading out loud the Expo brief and our design principles from the evaluative research phase. We stared at the matrix and let us be reminded of our own design imperatives.
After having listened to Ulu reiterate what we were doing in this project and how we wanted to tackle this, it became crystal clear that especially one of our concepts (Instant Help) fit the brief and our principles perfectly. The weird thing was that we didn’t use a weighted matrix or complex design decisions to get to this point — it just felt right. I have to say that I learned a lot about the design process during this moment. You can use all the tools and framework at your disposal to come to a rational decision but during this meeting something just clicked with all of us. We were aligned
Of course, did we have research based rationale behind this decision but it also kind of fell into place. This makes me feel optimistic that we can take on the next big milestone in our project: testing actual pototypes.
Week 12
Earlier in the week we got to go to the Mayor’s office! We had organized a meeting with Faye who is leading the Welcoming Pittsburgh Initiative — an organization very much in line with what we are trying to accomplish in our project. She gave us amazing insights into her work and connected us with other local refugee groups. Most interestingly, she introduced us to Ayla, a Syrian refugee who created the BAB (Build a Bridge) Foundation aiming to build a platform for refugees and local citizens to connect. We were able to connect with Ayla and she agreed to give us feedback on out concept! Also she is willing to share ALL of her research with us. What an amazing contact.
I realized, that we have now reached a point in the project where we actually have a concrete idea what our intervention will be. While this is a big step forward, we have at the same time been able to construct a vision of the future. We are now able to articulate how our intervention fits within a grand perspective of an inclusive and open society. I learned that this is just as important as the intervention itself. Peter has ben challenging us to look into the Heuristic Design Framework and now I know why, he wants us to look at the problem space on many different levels from micro to macro.
We also decided that our intervention is going to be an app which fits in well with the scale part of the brief and given the fact that our audiences have access to smartphones. I am happy about this since I have never really designed an app before.
At the same time, I was a little overwhelmed with the information architecture and logic of the prototype. Building out the flows and screens for our prototypes is quite a challenge! What I learned here was that the medium in which I am prototyping plays a crucial role. Going directly into Sketch was tough. I froze up while looking at all of the platform guidelines from Android and iOS and struggled with wrapping my head around the workflow. After I stepping back from Sketch and going back to pen and paper I felt much better as it was more appropriate at this stage. Having figured out the flow and screen elements on paper it was easy to transfer them into Sketch and work on a higher fidelity prototype.
The team is doing ok at this stage. Although it is apparent that there are so many things happening in parallel at this time in the semester. We are sacrificing a lot working on this project. I hope we are not doing it at the expense of long term mental and physical health though. Well, at least we’re talking about it more often.
Week 13
Monday, we had a check in for our next presentation. Peter and Bruce gave good feedback and we felt good about Wednesday. Especially, since we’ve been able to organize four (one unfortunately fell through at the last minute) usability testing sessions with refugees this week. Our connection with the mayor’s office does indeed seem to be paying off!
Our Wednesday presentation was good. Given that our topic is as complex at it is, we had to make certain decisions on what to focus on and what to leave out in our ten minutes. Our audience did have a few of questions about the logistics of our app which we could clarify during the Q&A. But it also surfaced a few questions we haven’t yet spend much time contemplating. One of Margaret’s suggestions was to have a deeper dive into the filtering / selection process, especially the gender aspect. Our research yielded the insight that refugees would like to select the helper’s gender as they feel more comfortable this way. Women were especially interested in this feature as they might feel strange interacting with men in certain cases. But this means that we have to consider other genders as well — this was our blind spot, something that we haven’t considered yet.
I feel that our project is situated in an ultra complex problem space and we need to be very careful how we’re dealing with it. There are many things at play here. In one conversation with Cat, it became clear to me that we need to make sure that our platform can’t be misused — I’m thinking of people actively trying to confront or troll the helpees. We have been discussing various ways of dealing with these challenges but we need to be more direct in addressing them. After all, we are dealing with very vulnerable groups here and our intervention is sadly still kind of controversial.
We had a wonderful meeting with a former Syrian refugee, Ayla. She is the founder of the Build a Bridge Foundation and has been grappling with a platform much like ours for years now. What a nice coincidence! She was very encouraging and gave us great insights and resources based on her own work. It’s become clear to me that it is so very crucial to get feedback from the right people — like Ayla.
Week 14
This week we had another round of incredibly valuable interviews and feedback sessions. We spoke with Raoul Nanavati from LitOS, a text-free, voice assisted custom Android operating system for low literacy users. Since our past research surfaced that a considerable portion of refugees has limited formal education and limited literacy, we learned a lot about designing for this specific user group. Raoul shared how research done by Indrani Medhi Thies, who is a researcher at Microsoft India specializing in UIs for low-literate and novice technology users, has influenced his work.
Also, we finally had a meeting and testing session with Benedict Killang, Program Manager at Allegheny County Department of Human Services (DHS). He himself is a former refugee and also worked at JFCS dealing with refugees for years. His feedback was amazing, very direct and straight.
We have gotten a lot of feedback on our app now. One thing seems to come up a lot — some say that the literacy and visual our current prototype is aligned with the capabilities of a majority of Pittsburgh’s refugees. Others say that our app should be geared more towards low literacy users. This is quite conflicting. What I have learned this week is that we need to take every feedback session with a grain of salt and always consider all the research we’ve done rather than just focussing on the last. Going forward we needed to make a decision where to focus our efforts. Ultimately, we decided to keep designing our app for the same kind of mid-literacy users we had targeted originally but would also include a stripped down version for the low-literate. This decision took a lot of debating and was a really tough one! Our team was quite split on this and we needed to zoom out a lot and reflect on our design principles and the brief to land on this. I learned that it’s absolutely critical to be aligned on this because I’m not sure we were until now. What I’ve been trying to do is to engage in what we’ve learned in ConflictU: active listening and always making sure that we are talking about the same thing.
Week 15
Monday after class, we had another meeting with JFCS. It had been a while since Ulu and Aadya had speed-dated our storyboards with them. Back then, they had given us very helpful feedback which shaped large parts of our concept development. Now it was time to get more concrete and in depth feedback on our help-plaform. For me personally, it was the first time that I got to meet them and I was excited since they are absolute experts.
In this meeting it became very clear to me just how vulnerable our stakeholders actually are. Talking with refugees directly, we received many insights regarding their needs but JFSC was way more explicit just how much they are struggling day to day in the most mundane situations.
Originally we wanted our platform to be able to allow helpers and helpees to connect over ma breath of different issues. However, after getting feedback we learned that we should not try to substitute actual casework that JFSC is providing. This was a crucial moment since we needed to scope down our concept from being quite pluralistic and open to only matching our helpers and helpees for certain low stakes issues.
I felt quite strange after our meeting. We had gotten feedback from many refugees and they seemed to respond well to the way we had framed and what kinds of help we were offering but JFCS challenged a big chunk of it — and they were right doing it. Since then we restructured our app quite substantially, cutting many features and whittling it down. Now it feels like a more thoughtful concept because we were now trying to do one thing well rather than everything a little.
Week 16
This week was mostly about usability testing of our app, specifically the citizen facing part. We had a big discussion about how me might go about testing our screens this time around. During the past testing sessions we had loaded our screens onto a phone and put it in front of our users. This inadvertently raised the fidelity of our (still mid-fi) prototypes considerably. Hence, we received very detailed feedback on basically everything that was on the screen. Also, I noticed that our testings went much longer than expected due to the tremendous amount of feedback we received in our sessions.
The medium is the message: I learned that it’s crucial match the means of prototyping to the desired kind of feedback. That’s why we decided to take a step back and test our app via printed our screens. As expected, users weren’t giving to much feedback on the visual design but rather on the logic, flow, and tone of voice — exactly what we wanted.
We also got more into the visual design, specifically colors and typefaces. I realized how much I appreciate testing out many different approaches because I believe that it does matter greatly regarding how the app feels and not only looks. That said, I learned that our team had different ideas about the visual design. So it took many discussions and work sessions to align the team. Everyone’s opinion needs so be considered!
Week 17
We did it — we gave our final presentation.
I am so proud of my team, it was an intense week for us. SO many things needed to be done and we pulled it off. Honestly, I feel many things at the moment. I am incredibly happy that we’re done. But I also feel sadness — this project which has grown to be such an important part of my life is now over.
My main take away from this week is related to team dynamics. At the beginning of the week I was sure that we needed to build our our core assets for the presentation conceptually first and then think about styling and illustrations. But I neglected the fact that the ‘visual stuff’ too is very important and should be treated as such. Aadya kept suggesting that she could make illustrations both for the app and for the presentation and I kept cautioning her to focus on the conceptual parts first. However, it’s crucial to allow team members to express themselves in their work to be motivated. I felt bad that I kept her from doing something that was very fulfilling to her and that ultimately became a valuable asset in our presenation. Her illustrations were totally worth it. During Q&A after our presentation, Stuart even complemented them directly saying that they hit an appropriate tone of voice and were quite engaging.
Ayla who has been an amazing inspiration and source of key research insights planned on coming to our final presentation. We were very excited to present to her and get some final feedback. Unfortunately, she wasn’t able to come and join us. I felt quite sad about it since she is a direct stakeholder and I would have loved to hear from her. I just goes to show how important it is to keep up the correspondence with someone so special.
