EG2201A - 1

After completing my first semester of the first year, I declared Innovation Design Programme (IDP) as my second major. This decision was inspired by a senior whom I admire, but initially, I had only a vague idea of why I joined the program. My long-term ambition is to contribute to the founding of five Unicorn Start-Ups in Japan, aiming to overcome the pervasive "sense of stagnation" in our country. This ambitious yet vague goal motivated me to pursue IDP. The first module I took, EG2201 User-Centred Collaborative Design, was instrumental in helping me clarify and solidify my reasons for choosing this second major, as well as refining my future goals. In this reflection, I'd like to share what I learned throughout EG2201.

But firstly I would like to give special thanks to our professors, teaching assistants and groupmates; who helped guide me to various learning and enjoyment. I would also like to give a huge thanks to my senior who introduced me to this programme. 

[Introduction]
This course, EG2201 User-Centred Collaborative Design, as its name suggests, is designed to create products or services for users' demands. But more specifically we have to design products that are desirable for our targeted audience, and logically plan ahead to make products feasible and viable. “Desirabile”, “Feasible” and “Viable” are three important keywords in the course and the product can be represented by these three modifiers are considered innovative products. This was defined in the first lecture of this course. The rest of the 12 weeks of course was for us to work on our group project about “Going Plastic Less” and we chose to tackle this problem by “Reusable Container”. 

First-Hand Information - Information to Stand on Start Point

In subsequent lectures, we learned how to gather information and downloaded it so that we could start framing our problem. This is when I learned how important to gather first-hand information, while second and third-hand information is still remains valuable. I hesitated to interview strangers but my group mates helped me to do so. We followed the 8 tips listed below that we learned in the second lecture, which helped us to do effective interviews.

8 Tips for Interview: 

1. Build Rapport  - to gather useful information we have to be empathetic

2. Open-ended questions are more favourable

3. Avoid asking leading questions 

4. Actively listen to the interviewee

5. Prepare Probing Questions - questions to dig deeper 

6. Ask 5 WHYs (We call なぜなぜ分析 in Japanese)

7. Show me how - do not gather only verbal information 

8. Prepare an Interview Guide. 

After the interview, we tried to organize information using two frameworks that we learned during the lecture; 1. Empathy Map 2. Affinity Clustering, which was really effective in reframing our information.   

Empathy Map: 

Empathy Map is mainly used for reframing how users perceive some specific topic. Based on the first-hand information we gathered in the first interview we divide it into “Think and Fee”, “See”, “Hear” and “Say and Do”. We will also think about what makes users pain and what users hope (gain). We used sticky notes (online) to download information. Before using this framework our group was lost inside a huge ocean of information but this helped our group to organize our information into certain levels where we could at least understand what users perceive and feel painful. Moreover, this framework helps us always to stick with users' points of view. 

Affinity Clustering: 

In the next step, we clustered our findings into similar categories and titled them according to the characteristics of clusters. This process is called “Affinity Clustering” and is “A graphic technique for identifying emergent issues/problems and opportunities”. When we did this activity our group initially failed to name clusters in detail and uniquely. After professors and TA helped us point out this we tried to make titles more detailed so that we could understand the findings of fieldwork intuitively.