Entrepreneurial Design
Pivoting on your heels
There are times when consensus breaks. Members in a working group can loose confidence in an idea and begin to feel rudderless.
Many things can contribute to this: interpersonal friction, fear of failure, fear of letting go, lack of trust in the idea and each other and a breakdown of communications.
Recently, our team faced this very impasse. And it had been dragging on for a number of weeks, and exacerbated by a total stop in communications. Not all was bleak, however. After all, we find ourselves in an educational setting, where mistakes are encouraged, where learning comes in many forms and where instructors are well-trained to intervene.
When our instructor called a meeting, he began by rallying us around a unifying purpose: to build something we feel interested in, maybe even passionate about. He asked us our worst case scenario, should our project “fail”. Then he asked us what our vision of success was. Not surprisingly, we answered similarly and revealed that we have the infrastructure to come together with a common goal. But it was clear that two members didn’t love the direction we were going in.
So, we decided to scrap our initial idea and start fresh. Instead of play and adults, we are now looking at depression and empathy. In fact, we were inspired by our recent roadblock. It’s no secret that teamwork is a subtle art. A major challenge remains finding an intellectual meeting with team members who operate differently from yourself. So, generally speaking, we want to look at how to bring two disparate people together in a common understanding.
How might we break down stereotypes and build empathy for a person suffering from depression so that an outsider can come closer in understanding for a person suffering from depression.
We’ve decided to build an immersive experience in which a person progresses through various tactile and virtual experiences to prompt the physical symptoms of depression. We want the challenge to increase in each station, such that- symbolically- things “pile up” making for a heavy load to carry. By bringing participants through a simulation, we hope to put users in the shoes of a person suffering from depression. We hope that the simulation will show the complexity of depression and reveal unfair and false assumptions.
“If you kicked your own butt, you’d snap out of it”
“It’s your own fault you are depressed”.
“Lazy, unmotivated….these are character flaws you are responsible for”.
For now, we have identified at least four room in which the participant can have an experience simulating the symptoms of depression. Some are VR, like a disorienting way finding task. Some are physical, like wearing a weighted blanket for duration of the simulation.
Lots to be thankful for, lots of learnings and new frontiers. I look forward to seeing where this goes…
