Post-design thinking Workshop
Hi friend, long time no see!
In our last post, the five of us started our Capstone project for Boulder Crest Retreat. While doing our background research and waiting for the client kick-off, Tyler and I got to attend a workshop “Post design thinking: Designing for the consequences of Innovation” hosted by two brilliant designers who work at Etsy: Michael Yep and Kristin Leach. It was such an informative 3 hours and we got to practice on several thought-provoking design exercises about our capstone project, so I thought we’d share it with you.
Let’s take a look at what we did at the workshop and what we have learned!
Empathy Maps
We started off the workshop doing an empathy map related to our end users: veterans with PTSD. There are four components on the empathy map that revolves around the end user: what they say, what they do, what they think, and what they feel. By digging a bit deeper than a persona, an empathy map allows us to think about underlying needs and wishes of our end users (reflected from “what they think” and “what they feel”). This exercise also helped us better empathize with our customers.
Customer Letters
We were then introduced to an activity called “Customer Letters.” To quote the slides from the workshop: Customer letters is a generative exercise developed by Marty Cagan that helps teams articulate the customer benefits and reactions they intend to create through product development.”
In this exercise, we imagined ourselves as end users who have experienced the product, and now 5 years later, are writing thank you letters to express how grateful we are for their product’s feature and offerings. This exercise was really novel to us and we were immediately hooked. It first took us half an hour to wrote the letter, and then we exchanged notes on the interactions between customer and the product service, use of words, etc.
Looking back, this activity allowed us to empathize even more with the customers, articulate values customers most appreciated, to work backwards from the desired state, and imagine possible touch points between customers and the product service. The letters now live on the whiteboard of our project room to remind us of empathy, and how we want our product to benefit the veterans.
From journey map to the future cone
In the next activity we learned a tool called the future cone, it’s a framework that can generate many potential future states, and identify and classify types of future that we most desire and can explore further. There are three types of futures in the future scone:
1. Probable futures: most likely to happen, the default future.
2. Plausible futures: could happen, less likely and requires deviation from a default course.
3. Preferable futures: what we want to happen, derives from value judgment and more subjective.
In order to identify what is the space to introduce new design ideas, we first used a journey map to describe the current status of Boulder Crest Retreat. We separated a veteran’s journey after they return home from the Army into: returns home, at boulder crest retreat, home again (still in the program), and after the program ends.
Since we are still at the beginning phase of research, the second stage (what happens at the retreat) was still unclear for us, but still from this incomplete journey map, we were able to see that the returning-home phase has the most opportunities for design.
Now focusing on problems we identified at this phase, we started generating ideas that fall in the future cone. There are ideas that are more exploratory and conceptual, and others that are more down to earth. Though without enough background research these ideas are still thinking to far ahead, we were both surprised how we were able to find many valuable insights and potential ideas through analysing the information we have already.
Pace Layers
How are these ideas impacting the future? At last, we were introduced to the layers of society, and how we can better design for the long-term future if we can try and understand the consequences of our decisions and how they can impact different layers of our society. This reminds me of designing for sustainability, which is not often seen in design thinking, since most of the time we focus on designing for users, but often overlook how our design could impact society as a whole.
Thank you so much for reading and please stay tuned for our next adventure!
