Thinking Together: Thesis Critique
A lesson I learned in Christina Xu and Gary Chou’s Entrepreneurial Design class was great ideas don’t come up in isolation. You don’t solve design problems by isolating yourself and thinking through it long enough. Speaking through your ideas with people can result in breaking out of impasses remarkably quickly. While working on my project for their class that dramatically happened a few times where not only did I figure out a way around a problem I was having but I also found myself newly invigorated and excited about an idea of mine.
It was in this spirit that I met with my classmate Sejal Kotak, who also did an internship this summer around healthcare, working with the population of people with the chronic illness Crohn’s disease. We discussed our thesis ideas and critiqued each other’s initial blog posts that explained our early thoughts on thesis.
Sejal began by critiquing my image cluster. She inquired about a disconnect between my post on my thesis plan at the moment, a digital platform to serve as a companion to patients as they transition from finishing cancer treatment to survivorship, and my image cluster. The image cluster did not go into a great amount of detail exploring inspiration for the platform itself, but instead mapped out how the in-person hospital experience could link up with a remote digital platform for patients as well as with biometric sensors the patient may already have. I told Sejal I think she was totally right in pointing out this disconnect. With my image cluster I was jumping ahead to an ambition of mine for the thesis project, which is to at least consider and take into account the larger space and services that the platform could fit into and function with.
It’s pretty obvious, but in reviewing my initial blog post with her I realized I should always try to add a few images to a post because it makes for a more eye-catching post on Medium. A wall of text is also a lot less inviting for people to read than text that is broken up and accompanied by images. Sejal recommended I include process images and make sure to archive them myself in such a way that I can return to quickly see the areas I have already researched.
Sejal interpreted one of the goals of my project to be to take advantage of currently existing services as much as possible and avoid replacing or duplicating services. I hadn’t thought of this consciously as a goal of mine, so it was extremely helpful to hear her verbalize it explicitly like this. I think this a valuable ambition for any design project, especially one fitting into such a complex system as healthcare which has complex pre-existing protocols and norms.
In addition, it was really helpful to discuss the project because it got me thinking on what my next steps will be. I obviously want to pull from the research and work I did this summer at MSK but I need to do additional research. I would like to expand the research and try to get in touch with cancer survivors that were not treated at MSK. One initial thought I had for that was to contact and attend meetup groups for cancer survivors. The majority of research done this summer was broadly focused around the transition to survivorship. I will for sure need to do some more specific research into the specific problem area of survivorship I will focus on before developing prototypes to test. I’m sure connections made during the exploratory research phase will be of value for prototype testing.
Finally in discussing Sejal’s thesis concept, Sejal suggested that it is probably better when designing to discover a specific population and specific problem you want to address and then from there think of the technology you want to apply to solving it. I think this is a really good point and I would like to try to follow this as much as possible going forward. This probably also is a good way of avoiding incorrectly applying more or inappropriate technology to a problem. Often in design too it seems very elegant solutions are those that use very little technology to solve a problem.
Below is a recording of part of the discussion I had with Sejal. Apologies for the recording quality.
