#designsynthesis

With a set of How Might We questions in place, we moved into concept generation. We began with a broad brainstorming session, intentionally keeping the space open to avoid locking into solutions too early.

This exercise helped us surface the overarching categories where most ideas naturally clustered. Across the board, ideas fell into a few recurring directions: awareness and assistance, instant or easier access to loans, repayment systems, and incentives to encourage continued engagement and repayment.

At this stage, we consciously stepped back to examine whether what we had generated were full ideas, individual features, or assumptions carried over from existing systems. This distinction became important—it helped us identify which directions had the potential to evolve into standalone concepts and which were better suited as supporting elements.

From there, we began refining and combining ideas, framing them into early concept directions rather than finished solutions. The focus remained on exploration: testing how different ideas might work together, what problems they addressed, and where they fell short.

Following fieldwork in both cities, we moved into a phase of synthesis and analysis. We revisited interviews with street vendors, bank officials, and urban local body (ULB) representatives, pulling out key quotes, recurring themes, and moments of friction.

This process helped surface not just what was said, but also what remained unsaid - patterns of dependency, trust, confusion, and workarounds that shaped how the scheme functioned on the ground.

This process helped us move into deriving insights by connecting patterns across interviews and contexts. These insights became the foundation for reframing the problem and guiding our next design decisions. From these insights, we moved into framing How Might We questions that helped us reframe the problem space and open up opportunities for exploration.