The week we had a guest speaker from a startup here at the University’s research park called Earth Sense. Mike Hansen, an U of I alumni, gave an amazing presentation on his product development journey. He spoke of stories during his Industrial Design graduate days, the failures he had, and pretty much every problem along the way. Being an industrial designer myself, a lot of his experiences resonated with me. He talked about a system of going from 0-1000 in three intervals. Taking an idea from 0 to 1. Once you get the original prototype you go from 1 to 100, with different iterations of that concept. Finally the 100 to 1000, which is the mass production of a product. You can only imagine how many issues and minute things that intervene with this process.
A few Mike said during his presentation that stuck with me were to “ fail early and fail often”. The earlier on you fail, the quicker and easier it will be to make corrections/alterations. The more you fail the better the end result will turn out. Every failure breaches an opportunity for improvement. Which leads to the other quote from Mike, which was “ try again and again until you succeed.” This isn’t limit to product development, but across life. There’s two type of people the quitters and the go getters.
After Mikes presentation we broke into our teams. We had the task of designing a logo and coming up with a team name. Im apart of team one and we’re focusing on a innovative tread for prosthetic users. We came up with the name Solestice. Yes, we spelled it like the sole of a shoe. Which lead to the design of our logo. Its two triangles stack on top of one another, but they are off centered. After getting the tinker file finished we sent it off to the 3D printed and printed it out.
This week, we learned from expert Mike from a startup named EarthSense, strengthened the connection in our team and started to conduct research and gather information. I have gained many meaning insights and am planning to investigate some areas to further my understanding.
In the class, we first had a session with Mike from EarthSense. I have always known the importance of applying users’ feedbacks into adjusting the design, yet it was different to see a rich example and hear the story behind it. Adjusting one area would affect the previous setting in other areas. Therefore, a perspective of system thinking would be very critical. When the designer knows all the possible impacts, the design can consider all factors and is configured in a way that meets all the requirement. As a business student who has some new product development experience, I kept wondering how to make the products to be successful and have more adopters if I were a part of the team. I recognized some crucial points were to understand the problem it was solving, the pinpoint about people’s adoption behavior and the need to design the introductory marketing, pricing, and packaging plan in a way that could lead the product to cross the tipping point. Hearing the design side of the product, I realized understanding the design side of the product gave me more ideas to brainstorm.
After the talk from Mike, we came up with our team name and designed the logo. Since our focus is design, Saloni saw an opportunity by checking synonyms of “design,” and we decided on Blueprint to be our team name. Then, the designing logo part was the hardest part. We brainstormed about possible configurations and implications associated with the word. As I drew possible designs, I came across the idea to combine B and P together since they both have a round part. However, when I pulled it on paper, it didn’t look good. At that time, my group member encouraged me to configure the design on the software to see the effect. After I did that, I found it actually looked better than what I expected. Learning from the failure in the scratch, I intentionally enlarged the side of P so that the letter P could be differentiated from the letter B. We all loved it and it became our logo. I asked a couple of my friends to guess the meaning of the logo after class, the fact that they got the implication right confirmed me that my design worked. This made me aware that it worth a try to further test the idea and follow the instinct. Next time, I should stick to the idea a little bit longer before I give up too quickly.
After class, our team began our research by interviewing people who have more experiences than us. One key idea that I learned was the significance of equal accessibility. Previously, I was immersed with the concepts of accessibility and affordability, and now the idea of “equal” just made me contemplate more. The meaning of equality is not to provide the same resources to everyone. Rather, it is to provide resources to people in a way that everyone would be on the same level after the assistance. This would mean that we would need to give more opportunities to some people who started at a lower level. Knowing the difference in resources that people begin with can lead to a better design that will enable everyone to be on the same level.
I am Huan Wu, a leadership-oriented undergraduate student studying Accountancy, Supply Chain Management and Information Systems/Information Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
I chose to major in those areas because I am a person who likes to learn new knowledge continuously and take on challenges. The challenges bring me excitement, as I enjoy the feeling of using my expertise to tackle hard issues, find insights and initiate change. I believe having an understanding of different fields allows me to have a broader perspective when I look at issues in business. I aim at improving myself and learning skills to initiate change and make real impacts in the world in the future.
My LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/huan-wu-0507/
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