Prototype through conversation
In the past month, we experienced a lot in social lab class. We worked extremely hard for the impact award narrowing down our initiative, fleshing out our proposal and having 4 rounds of iteration. But we didn’t get the grant. Suddenly I don’t understand the meaning of all we did, where we are and where we are heading to.
We all took some time to reflect. I got the chance to see other teams’ presentation in the impact awards. They are all very passionate about what they are doing and some of them have been working closely with their partners for a long time. Their proposals are very proper to the initiative and within their specialty.
I thank impact awards. It made me become more clear about what social impact is about. I remember we always had the question about our role in the process. But we didn’t have enough conversation with the community to find out our role.
Now we are in a brand new start. The team Sage is dismissed. With a better understanding of the social impact, we are ready to devote our time on the impact we want to create.
The next stage, we are going to focus on prototyping. For our team, we have more work to do. We will immerse us in the community we want to work with, have conversations with them, know them and create things with them.
As designers, we never have the problem of lack of idea. But having an idea is far from creating a helpful service for the community. That’s why we need prototyping. Prototyping is actually a way to create multi-dimensional conversations with a wide range of people, such as teammates, community partners, the people we will serve. And we will gradually ask the right questions along the way. And by asking the right questions, we give a proper answer.
The fist conversation will happen within the team. Clarify intention. What’s our passion? Are we committed? What’s the purpose of the project? Here is our team journey when we did the Sage project. Different color of lines indicates different team members mood. You can see how different we feel and think of our project in all phases of the project. There are few moments we were really unified. Checking in with teammates and clarifying intention is the no.1 thing.
The next thing is the conversation with the community. From the article of “ PROTOTYPING FOR SOCIAL IMPACT: A Q&A WITH NATHALIE COLLINS, SENIOR DESIGN LEAD AT IDEO.ORG”, for the first-time prototypers, asking questions like “What can we learn from this and what does it inspire us to do next?” instead of “Is it working or not?” is more helpful. Because a yes or no questions won’t bring you any far. Another thing about prototyping for social impact is that it’s a system work. There will be the physical prototype. But in most cases, it will be an experience prototype. The big difference between the two is that for the latter, you’re thinking in terms of time. How to schedule to make people have the conversation together.
Creating an open environment for deep conversations to happen will eventually lead to a solution that is come with by all the people together and will benefit all.
