Social Impact Design Sprint
A beautiful, idea-filled, mess of a day
This Saturday I attended an almost full-day design sprint at the Idea Forge on CU Boulder’s campus. It was a great experience and so I thought I’d share the process we went through and what I learned from being there.
What is a design sprint?
The all-knowing Wikipedia says that a design sprint is a “time-constrained process that uses design thinking with the aim of reducing the risk when bringing a new product, service or feature to the market.” In this definition, Wikipedia mentioned that it’s a “five-phase process”, but I wanted to remove that part as I believe it’s more important to focus solely on the fact that there is some kind of time pressure, and it involved design thinking as there are many different ways of design thinking.
And we’re off!
The sprint began at around 10:30am. A good amount of my colleagues were also in attendance, so this made the environment a little more comfortable. The majority of the participants were either from CMCI or a program called “Watson” which seemed to consist of a lot of foreign exchange students. We had a great mix of people and it made for a wonderful collaborative environment.
After a quick briefing on what exactly a design sprint “means”, we started to split off into groups based on similar interests. The topic of the day was designing for social impact some of the topics were sustainability, community, and health. I placed myself into the community grouping. The final groups were decided amongst ourselves and were typically around four or five people. I was lucky enough to have the one and only Yvonne Danyluck in my group! Along with a gentleman named Brian, a graduate student at CU, and Alex, a man from Austria who was part of the Watson program.
Once the grouping stage was completed, we moved onto exploring the problem space, something I have become very familiar with during my time at CMCI. We started with affinity mapping, just writing down as many ideas as we could, or things that had to do with the problem space. We then grouped our post-its into relative categories. Using dots, our group was able to move forward pretty easily with the decision-making process. Yvonne and I were able to teach our group about how to make decisions in a collaborative environment, based on the things we’ve learned in class. One thing I really liked about our group, is that even when someone's preference wasn’t chosen, everyone still wanted to incorporate that idea into the next step. Alex wanted to explore education which wasn’t the majority vote, but we still brought that idea onto our next steps.
The problem statement that we settled upon was “How might we bring people on CU’s campus together to foster a sense of belonging by servicing the community?” We felt that was a need for people not feeling involved in the community and were exploring feelings that go along with it, trying to understand the potential user.
The next notable step we moved onto was brainstorming on possible solutions. Ideas were a bit scattered at first, as we thought our problem statement may have been a bit too broad. Some mentors helped us narrow it down a little bit. This part of the sprint I found to be pretty interesting as we started to edit our problem statement on the fly.
After going through a couple of solution brainstorming sessions, we settled upon a digital application that allows the users to exchange services in person using the idea of social/karma currency. No money involved. The two stages of users would be “givers” and “receivers”, alternating to one another every time they either gave or received. Like paying your giving forward. We also really wanted to push the fact that the central focus on the app would be to meet people in person. We wanted to shift away from the digital aspect, although this is where the user journey had to begin. Some examples of these services would be things like giving music lessons, language lessons, fixing someone's cars/machinery, etc. Services that had to be performed in person.
We then mapped out what we believed to be a proper user journey. This helped us identify the key steps in the process and pulling those to design some initial prototype screens. And that’s what we did! We sketched three screens: a user profile with interests and reviews, a matching screen where the user would match with someone for their exchange, and a confirmation screen along with next steps.
Pitching our product idea was the next step, and we had to do it in about a minute. We went a little over, but that’s ok! Basically all the teams did, and we were still able to get our point across. The judges then gave us some feedback and constructive criticism, and we were done! People started clearing out at around 5:30pm.
Although I’m not sure how viable this solution is, it was a blast coming up with ideas in my group and design thinking our way through this sprint. I really enjoyed using things we’ve learned in the studio in a real-world setting. Every time we do something similar to this, I learn so much about collaboration, as I feel like every team is different and each new person has something new to bring to the table; their perspective, their ideas. It’s very cool! Excited to more of these sprints in the spring, as I feel like I’ll be able to hone this skill even further.
