Weevil Labs Weekly Report
Week 6 | 13 Feb — 17 Feb
Objectives
This week, our focus was on convening with our sponsor to hear updates and explore design priorities, sharing and collating preliminary research, and adjusting our plans for future research based on these findings.
Actions
After a weeklong semester break, our Monday meeting was an opportunity to plan a design challenge with our sponsor. While our kick-off had been valuable for learning about the scope of the project and sharing a rudimentary timeline for research, design and deliverables, for our second meeting we hoped to identify priorities that could then guide our ideation. To facilitate discussion, we sought to craft a short exercise that would be engaging, inclusive, and accessible in a short timeline, and that would help us begin generating design directions. An activity that combined brainstorming, card sorting, and a star voting system emerged from our discussion, centered around a loose theme of designing the cover of Travel + Leisure magazine for a 2022 issue. We chose three open prompts to guide our design thinking:
1) What will tourism in Madeira look like in five years?
2) What will hotel technologies look like in five years?
3) What will the Gorgulho Hotel look like in five years?
This activity uncovered a number of talking points. The following were among those we will continue to explore:
- Connecting guests with similar interests and enabling a feeling of community/opportunity to share experiences
- Catering to different demographics, both the older guests who comprise the majority of the hotel’s current clientele and younger guests that the hotel and the broader Madeiran tourism industry hope to attract
- Delivering a curated daily digest of information to help guests fill out their itineraries (possible appeals are tangibility and immediacy: Surprise, discovery, and a combination of analog and digital spaces)
- Preserving the identity and facade of the Gorgulho Hotel while modernizing its offerings
Next Steps
At this point, we’ve gathered a wealth of secondary research through our competitive analyses and literature reviews. For our next research exploits, we intend to validate and expand on what we’ve learned.
Upcoming tasks:
1) Reviewing each others’ notes from the first round of literature review and highlighting any salient findings
2) Evaluating our competitive analysis to determine whether there are any additional factors we’d like to consider
3) Beginning to plan ethnographic research
4) Starting to schedule tourism activities to learn about guest attractions available on the island
5) Meeting with the newly onboarded operations management team
