the flaneur

Prompt :  Reflect on how you work Think about ways that you can get to the core of what is the most important customer benefit How did your group come to agreement?  Was this hard? It was hard for group to come to agreement in Ideation Phase, particularly for a group of 7, because there are many ways to tackle the same problem through many different layers. 

" There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused.... ?   but customer-focus is most rewarding ... "  ----- Jeff Bezos, 2016 letter to shareholders " Customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don't yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf. No customer ever asked Amazon to create the Prime membership program, but it sure turns out they wanted it, and I could give you ..... "  What Do I Think ? 

Stay open  Something I have learnt in Architecture School, particularly thesis If we are designing for innovations, not just a pure solution for a problem in front of eyes. Do not narrow down too fast  Important to open up design opportunities Keep ideas flowing during ideation stage  Ask questions that open up avenues , not narrow down...  " If you want to have good ideas, you must have a lot of ideas"  Do not get fixed on one idea too quickly and loose sight of others possibilities...  Not looking for local maximum, but global maximum.

In Week 3 in class, we were introduced a design approach. Think about Design Audience and come up with a Design Argument.  The suggested steps are as follows: (1) Pre-disposition (2) Observation (3) Insight (4) Concept (5) Implementation It was very helpful to help our team clarify thoughts.  We did this exercise together in class as a team. We made progress on our design argument:  Our group is interested in Seniors  with Food Insecurity.  (1) Some pre-dispositions:  - They are on fixed income - Not eating the right thing - Hard to be excited about eating because they are alone all the time (2) Some design concepts: - Financially :     Start young, how to educate future generate to plan for retirement and financial planning ? Could we help seniors to create value? Any sources of passive channels for additional income in which they can still contribute to society?  - Socially :  Could we pair up s...

HCDE 503  Wk 3: How do you deal with complex information? - make mind-maps - diagram out  - list out priority  - think about big picture - redefine the bigger goals, constraints and resources  - then narrow down scope 

UW x Microsoft Mentorship Program Kick-Off Event  Hosted by the Microsoft Cloud + AI team, there was a great panel discussion about career development. Six people from the team, including researcher, content designer, studio lead, data scientist, UX designer and produce, sat together to talk about what their roles, how they came into this position and their joy and challenges. Look at the notes I took and you can tell how engaged I am by their discussion. I was also paired up with a mentor, who is currently a website designer in the team and does branding & marketing work for 4 products. Her background was in graphic design, I am very excited to be mentored by her this year. We have decided to meet up monthly and I will come up with the structure of what we are going to discuss.  The panelists took turns to discuss about what they think is the quality to success.  Here is the list: - curiosity   ( agree)  - empathy  - no...