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/
Hi Huan, I really like your design of the logo with the team name of Blueprint, but what I am more impressed is the transition in your mind from focusing on accessibility and affordability to equality. I think a better word that may phrase your idea is equity, giving everyone what they need to reach the same level of success or quality of life. I think this idea is unique among the groups, but getting this idea to reality may be extremely hard. It will involve a great amount of research on the need and what types of need different users need because everyone is different in some way in terms of his or her needs. It will be extremely hard for one product to address the differences in need and reach somewhere that people can be at the same level. This also depends on how you define your goal of helping people to get to which level.