Weevil Labs Weekly Report
Week 17 | 1 May — 5 May
Objectives
As we approach the end of the term, we seek to draw out concepts from our opportunity areas that will direct our work in the fall. To that end, we spent the week visioning solutions, sharing these proto-ideas with our client, and ramping up to present our work at the semester’s end in a few weeks.
Actions
Ideation
Over the weekend, the five of us took part in a visioning workshop that we had custom designed at our last meeting. After a brief warm-up “hype” session led by our Stoke Master Mike, we launched into a series of twenty 10-minute design sprints in small groups, driven by prompts that had been remixed from our identified opportunity areas. After lunch, we reconvened in the afternoon to explain/pitch our ideas to each other, clustering them into similar themes. After a short period of reflection studying the clusters that had emerged, we shared the ones that seemed most appealing, and from there pulled forward the most collectively intriguing ideas to develop.
Preparation to meet with our client
The following day we met again to revisit these ideas with fresh perspective. This time we adopted a “yes and” model to fill out and collate our ideas, and then polish them into more refined versions. We began to consider what they could look like in context and constructed narratives around them, finding that storyboards were an effective method to both explore options among ourselves and illustrate to stakeholders how they could play out. Some ideas lent themselves to many fragmented visions, while others crystallized into more developed shared visions. We began to organize them for presentation to our client, using a loose format to bind the ideas to value propositions and sample tech implementations, while simultaneously accommodating their various levels of sophistication.
Meeting with our client
We were pleased to see our client respond favorably to our concepts, even as we discussed the risks and challenges associated with each one. Although no clear preferences emerged, our general directions were affirmed and met with open-minded curiosity. Our client recommended we run the concepts past his operations management team before pursuing any one further, so we prepared a summary document for their review and await feedback.
Next Steps
As we move forward, these are the tasks that will occupy the following week:
- Continuing to document our process and craft a narrative that speaks to our work over the course of the semester
- Visiting the hotel site to renew our feel for the space
- Reviewing the insights and input of the operations management team
