We have been overall 44 students in the 3rd year and we developed in multidisciplinary teams together with eight renowned companies and NGOs new services, processes, it-platforms, products and communication tools within the 12 weeks project.

The complete programm overiew of the D-Vision¹² is available as a pdf file here.

I’ve been part of the Spaza Logistc Team, we worked on the problem “How might we efficiently replenish the stock level of typical farmer shops (called Spazas) in rural areas of South Africa (Kgautswane) in sustainable manner?” Our project partners during the 12 weeks have been: SAP Research, Meraka Institute, DEG Pretoria.

We’ve been the first team of the HPI School School of Design Thinking who worked on a Design Thinking project in a foreign country with project partners not located in Germany.

Update

The final presentation of our team can be viewed here. All other videos of the D-Vision¹² projects presentation are available also at tele-task.de

Ok, so we all know that sometimes you need to go back in the design thinking process. Maybe during testing you realize that your prototype is just not working or its fixing the wrong problem. You might want to go back to brainstorming to come up with something different, that does fix the right problem and fixes it in the right way. It seems like a reasonable thing to do. If something doesn’t work, come up with something else!
Today (Workshop day IV), however, we experienced a situation where we had to go back to the beginning of ideation. Maybe even to Point of View. So we went back and went through “Point of View” and “Ideation” again. Just to end up with the same solution we had before. So what happened? What was different now?

We had came out of the Point of View with 3 different personas. Neither of which was very defined. So we decided on a brainstorming topic and stormed on how to establish mutual trust among children, teachers and parents. Accomplishing this would have served two of our personas: The engaged teacher who wanted to be empowered as a third parent as well as the concerned parents, who were unsure if they should put their kid in a school with a high percentage of migrant kids. We came up with the idea of children, parents and teachers cooking different traditional dishes together so that they all could learn from each other about their different cultures. We were refining the solution in a way that would make it work for everybody. How would we make sure everybody would take part? What if they did not understand each other perfectly? Should they be playing some sort of games to learn to trust each other? We started to fix on every corner to make the solution work for every participate we could possibly imagine.

At some point, however, we noticed that we were trying to fix everything and building a solution that looked like a patchwork of small fixes. Energy level in our team was low and you could feel it. It was painful to keep up working because every step required an immense effort in explaining why one thought this one small addition would make sense. When it became clear to us that we were all thinking about different personas, problems and goals, we decided to go back to our problem statement, refine it to start over from there.

We chose the point of view of the parent who is concerned about the quality of education in a culturally diverse class. It was sometimes hard to stick to it to come up with a brainstorming question because there were so many other potential personas with so many needs that could also be addressed in brainstorming. But somehow this time we managed to stick to this single one.

So we asked ourselves: How can we make these parents see the value of cultural diversity. And we came up with the most common occasion where you notice the value of diversity. We came up with: Food!
It did not take long from here to arrive at pretty much the same solution we had before. But the way we felt about this solution had totally changed. We knew exactly who we would be trying to shape an experience for and why this would be the right experience for them. The German parent who needed to experience the value of diversity that his kid could later on experience in the school. Having this path in mind totally changed the confidence the team had in the idea. Next thing you know the energy level was soaring and finalizing the idea became a breeze. It was easy to stay at d.school until 9 p.m. testing and refining the idea and finally preparing the presentation structure. Motivated we look forward to next day final presentation.

I guess the point is, that sometimes you have to go back even if your idea is working already. If your team is missing the confidence in the idea that originates from looking back at a sound and logical path for arriving at a particular idea, working on it can be painful and demotivated. Once this path is clarified working on it becomes a breeze.

- Felix Speiser & Abraham Taherivand

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