Wasted Space and Transportation
Overview:
For the third week of the course, we faced the task of choosing a problem space. Our focus was making sure that we chose a issue that not only affected our target audience, but also provided an improvement to the quality of life at the UCSD as a whole. We wanted to stay clear of “progress for the sake of progress” and decided to tackle the issue of wasted space around campus, with an emphasis on transportation. We found that not only did all students feel affected by this issue, but that they also had a very strong opinion on the topic, one way or another. Our personal mission this week was to better understand our users, what they found the problems to be, and why they found them to be so. We’re looking forward to finding patterns and furthering discussion from our interviews.
What each of us thought:
“During last week’s session, my group and I were fixated on ideation. We walked through the topic of ‘waste of space’, and brainstormed issues within this that we thought were the most prevalent. However, no matter how we looked at it, we felt stuck. Through the problems and ideas we came up with together, there was no particular one that sparked inspiration. Later that meeting, we were fortunate to receive some mentorship from Joshua, an actual professional working in user experience research and design. Through his guidance and aid, we realized that instead of focusing so much on ideation, we should take a step back, look at our topic, and actually go through user interviews to hear their thoughts on the topic. We were so fixated on finding a problem space by our own means, we forgot that the people we interview and our general audience was also a great way to discover issues in ‘waste of space’. With that in mind we set forth to perform interviews and deep hanging out and to share our findings the next time we meet.”
Take it easy,
Whale
“This week’s challenge proved to be actually quite fun. We were faced with the task of picking a problem space officially, and expanding upon it to make it solution-friendly. Upon deliberation, it was decided that the idea of “wasted space” was going to serve as our problem space for the rest of the duration of this project. We wanted to address an issue that was prevalent to the entirety of the UCSD community, and in doing so, we chose the specific intention of “transportation”. Inspired by the young student that lost his life dealing with on-campus transportation, we made it our mission to have a safer, more fluid mechanism of transportation for all parties involved, whether it be pedestrians, cyclists, shuttles, or golf carts. Interviews reared exactly what we expected to see — almost every individual spoken to had a strong opinion, either one way or another. This is how we knew that our problem space was valid and approachable. We’re really looking forward to figuring out what will be able to come of this.”
Cheers,
Ocelot
“As I said before.. the ideation process is always the most difficult. We presented organizations as our main problem space and received valuable feedback — as expected, many other students are passionate about orgs and how to (logistically) fix them on our campus. But we just weren’t satisfied. We didn’t want tunnel vision, and Thomas, one of our instructors, made a good point — sometimes you lay out point A, B, and C from the start and follow a certain path, but maybe you’re missing the right one. So, we decided to look at other problems — one of our favorites was wasted space. Our mentor, Joshua, sat with us and looked over our ideas, and he certainly gave us guidance and direction on what to do next. We’ve yet to solidify our ideas, but I certainly feel like we’re getting close.”
Regards,
Lion
“Last week was a little chaotic. The ideation process left everyone a little worn out and it was hard to narrow the possible problem spaces down from all the options, but that’s what this week was about, getting focused, but without getting too focused. From our mentors and our peers we learned a little about the danger of getting too narrow too soon, especially before you interview your users. It may seem obvious, but for your eventual solution to have value, it has to actually matter to your target audience. It’s easy to see a personal problem and assume that it also applies to everyone else, but sometimes it does not. You may also find that there’s a larger, more immediate issue that you hadn’t even considered. So this week, that’s our goal, get to know the users, the students and faculty who deal with these issues and construct a clearer picture of how they interpret this campus.”
Best,
Turtle
