Embracing Ambiguity as a Designer/Researcher
We all hate ambiguity. But how do we turn it into actionable items?
Transforming “?” to actionable notes
When we first walked into the capstone classroom and saw the poster about our projects, we were overwhelmed with questions. What is IIOT? What’s a digital twin? And why were we working on problems in agriculture and education, two seemingly unrelated fields?
We wrote down all of our questions on post-it notes and brought them back to the room with the hope that the answers would come to us eventually. Little did we know that this passive approach won’t get us very far. We asked our faculty mentors if there was anything we were missing, but we soon realized that this wasn’t getting us anywhere. Our faculty mentors encouraged us to categorize our questions into different areas like tech, domain, market, and user, and then use the method mapping technique to find the best research method for each question. By adopting this structured and proactive approach, we felt more confident and ready to move on to sprint 0 with a clear understanding of what our team wanted to achieve.
Re-evaluating our relationship with faculty mentors
Looking back at that time, my team was quite passive. We went into the first meeting without a plan and relied on our mentors to dictate what our next steps should be, which is not how real industry works. That’s why it’s important to start developing the skills of an independent knowledge seeker now. The team shifted our mindset and reevaluate our relationship with our faculty mentors. Instead of just reporting our weekly progress, we’ve decided that going forward, we should use our time together to collaborate and create something meaningful.
Defining clear “outcomes”
In the first sprint, we also established what success would look like for our capstone project and wrote it on the whiteboard in our room as a guiding principle. In hindsight, our goals were a bit too broad and vague. We wanted to have an in-depth understanding of the IIoT market, but what does “in-depth“ even mean? And as we delved deeper into the problem space, we realized there were countless sub-problems to address. We decided to conduct some additional desktop research to gain a better understanding of the field. This will help us set more meaningful and achievable goals.
Having fun!
Aside from working in the lab, our team also took some time to bond and get to know each other. We used our team charter to understand each other’s preferred working styles and goals for the project. We believe that having a deep understanding of each team member and embracing our differences leads to a psychologically safe team environment. And of course, it’s always fun to get to know each other outside of the capstone context. We’re looking forward to more boba runs and climbing sessions together!
We also make an effort to connect with other capstone teams each week by sharing our insights and asking for feedback. This helps us broaden our perspectives and pick up on things we may have missed.
Last but not least… here’s your dream team!
We are a team of five student designers and researchers: Zoya Egiazaryan, Wendy Ju, Tejas Sarvankar, Roong Vorasucha, and Sonia Wu. We are excited to be working with two amazing faculty mentors, Anthony Levin-Decanini and Ben Tsai. Follow our page to stay updated on our journey as we explore people’s needs for sensor management on an industrial scale.
*The work and knowledge gained from this project are only intended to be applicable to the company and context involved and there is no suggestion or indication that it may be useful or applicable to others. This project was conducted for educational purposes and is not intended to contribute to generalizable knowledge.
*This project is not intended to contribute to generalizable knowledge and is not human subjects research.
