Week 10: The Flying Disaster Bus

Incase you’re wondering why we called it the Flying Disaster Bus..don’t. It’s an internal joke that you’ll never know. NEVER.

As a quick refresher from what happened last week. After our client onsite speed-dating session, we got 4 main takeaways from the client.

1. Make the solution more citizen focussed.
2. There is no restriction on the kind of technology the final solution uses.
3. The solution can be a service but it should have a product (such as an app) as a part of it.
4. We don’t need to deep dive into legal factors of the solutions.

Using these takeaways and adding some more that we discussed, we decided to reframe the assumptions we made for them. An example being, families will always want to shelter together. The precise name for this exercise is “Reverse Assumptions and 20 questions”. This method helps think of the problem from a different perspective. It helps generate new solutions as well as helps in refining and iterating on the any solutions you might have made before.

The structure that the exercise follows goes as listed below.

1. Make a list of assumptions you’ve made for your solutions.
2. List the reverse assumption for the same.
3. Make a list of questions that can help think about the reverse assumption more deeply.
4. Make a list of services that help answer the questions.

This exercise helped us generate a ton of new design solutions. Some of the most interesting insights/reverse assumptions that came out of this exercise are

1. People maybe going to hospitals as the last resort
2. Families may be willing to split up during disaster if it is for the safety of all the family members.
3. Caregivers may not always put their patients needs ahead of their/ their family’s needs during disasters.
4. All caregivers may have some common set of skillsets.
5. People will not always trust everything an app tells them.

Next Steps

We used these assumptions to make design solutions which we are now taking forward to develop into scenarios individually. We will then reconvene, share them with each other and choose some of the best ones to take forward.

Other things we did this week

1.A lightweight research of caregivers with each of us taking up an area of research specific to caregiving. Overall, we covered

1. Challenges faced by caregivers
2. Roles and Responsibilities of Caregivers
3. Disaster plan and reaction
4. Tools and Technology

2.We also discussed the site map for the team website for Spring and we have split up responsibilities for

1. Finding and figuring the website template
2. Finalising the Research content
3. Finalising the Homepage content

And That’s all Folks! Until next time!