Last week, our team continued our Insight Synthesis work with the development of problem statements. These problem statements were developed from the journey maps that we developed. Since I was not in class on Thursday due to interview scheduling during our class time, I missed the development of these problem statements. However, I heard about the experience from my classmates, and was given a handout that detailed instructions for me to create my own problems statement.
I’m finding this step in the process to be helpful in gaining a more secure direction for our project, which was something I’ve been struggling with up until now. The synthesis of our data has shown evidence for problems that I was brainstorming before. The difference is that now we have concrete data to show that these problems exist, and that we can move forward in ideation. For example, I personally knew that as a college student, I struggled with balance of social, personal, and academic time. I could use my own insights to create an idea from; however, this would not be following the procedures of the project. We needed to see that these pains and gains existed in data that we methodologically collected to confirm their widespread presence.
I’ve also been finding it interesting to come back to the process that we did in miniature in our Design Thinking Boot Camp. I’ve now begun to notice the parallels in the processes that we carried out in the beginning of the year with our creation of cellphone products. It has been interesting to use the same steps in a more detailed and thorough way for our housing project.
The creation of a problem statement has been helpful in tying our interview data, observational data, and secondary research into one accurate and concise statement that is based on the relationships between the data. The similarities within all of our data confirmed my own personal ideas about students’ issues with time management and balance, as well as some other problems. Our next step will be to choose one problem statement to focus on so we can continue to move towards our ideation of our final product.