Ideation — Divergence and Convergence
During Week 6, My team and I delved deeper into the process of ideation and brainstorming. We focussed on jotting down ideas as they came to us rather than polishing them first. We started off our process by looking at the clusters of our ideas collected through our divergent technique of interviewing using the 5 why’s. The most common problem related to mental health is the stigma around it. We created an affinity map converging these pointers for the same. We had 4 broad areas of problem-focussed challenges. These were:
1. Hard to talk About — we noticed some discomfort while speaking about loneliness as a topic
How can we use innovation to remove societal discomfort around difficult conversations?
To look into this problem, we thought of the concept of AA meetings and how they are a ‘no-judgement zone’. This concept could similarly be applied to our college community. We could possibly have anonymous confession pages and meet-ups where students could share their thoughts on a board anonymously, that could later be picked up and talked about.
2. Relatability — we as interviewers, could draw incorrect conclusions from. interviews since we were not able to relate to different situations
How can we as designers be more empathetic towards other’s feelings?
As designers we have to be prepared for all kinds of responses and findings that we receive from research. The first step to make this process easier would be to remove the bias. We should look at all interviewees equally regardless of our previous or background knowledge of them. For this, we thought of taking anonymous surveys to understand responses in isolation.
3. Acceptance — there was a fear of being judged and embarassment of accepting such problems among interviewees
How can we ensure that one can reach out for help without embarassment?
Here, we considered adding a helpline number option. When you can pick up the phone and make a call without an appointment, it is often easier than making the effort.
4. Difference in action — different interviewees dealt with the problem in different ways, it is important to recognise every one of these methods.
How can we inculcate the interviewee’s ideas into our solution?
Sometimes, the greatest inspiration is at the source. We inculcated into our ideation board the various techniques that our interviewees felt helps them feel better about their mental health. For example, one said food, we instantly thought of pizza night in the NYU community.
The ideation process need not be neat and polished. In the word of Professor Hu, ‘Go Crazy!’
Throughout our ideation process, we realised that we can tackle larger problems once we focus on what is around us. Our train of thought is now around the student community, particularly the NYU community and we worked to build opportunity statements for the same. Starting with a broad ‘how might we’ statement ‘How might we alleviate the feeling of loneliness among this community?’ to a more narrow ‘How might we help NYU students talk about loneliness in physical settings?’. We will be using a bottom-up approach in our ideation process to further create an opportunity framework targeting smaller segments of our population and more fundamental problems that we can take inspiration from to tacle larger ones.
As the weeks go by, I feel the team resonating with the problem at hand more and more and reaching closer to a solution. The data we have collected and tools we have been using have led to the clarification of this assignment. The direction I am most excited about is thinking of how Apple as a firm would navigate around this challenge and putting myself in those shoes, how can innovation be used to battle a societal issue that can not be solved by solely relying on technology. I am intrigued by the thought of the human element or almost-human element in our product solution.