#stals006

As my sophomore year comes to an end, and I sit here writing my final reflection for Design 1000, I can’t help but feel just a little bit sad. I’ve made a lot of great memories this past semester, especially in this class. I got the opportunity to work with a great group of people the whole semester and see our team really go from forming to performing. And I got introduced to the design process and began to learn how to design things. This was my first design class I took at the University of Minnesota, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect when I came the first day. But after coming to class and seeing what Design @ Minnesota is like, I’m excited to take more! I think this class was a great introduction to every design program here at the University of Minnesota. It taught me all of the beginning stages of the design process and taught me how to use the skills I already had to be creative. Keep up the good work for next year and years beyond!

It’s been quite a year! My group presented this past Wednesday on non-violent drug users and I was overall very impressed with our project. We toured the Minnesota Recovery Connection and actually talked to former non-violent drug users. It was inspiring and incredibly interesting, and ultimately I think our documentary would be successful. I learned a lot this year. The design process that we have gone over and the work that has gone into learning about it has definitely made me a better designer. Throughout the other projects that I’ve now been working on, I’ve tried to use the design process and it’s really helped me. I learned how to conduct market research and use that to ideate new product and project features. I think I can further use these skills while I do a product management internship this summer.

Our site visit this week was incredibly interesting. Our prompt for our project revolves around changing society’s perception of non-violent drug users, so we decided to tour the Minnesota Recovery Center to learn more about non-violent drug users, and how society and the government often prevents them from succeeding. It was especially interesting because we got to actually talk to non-violent drug users, including some that had been to prison. One thing that one woman said that was especially interesting was that everyone she’s talked to, including herself gets out of prison and is excited to begin their new life. However, there are little to no resources once you get out of prison, and it’s nearly impossible to get a job, so most end up going back to what they knew before they were in prison: selling and doing drugs. Thus, the cycle continues and continues, and people are stuck where they are for the rest of their life. This lady we were talking to had ended up going to prison 9 times before she finally got a chance to rebuild her life in the Minnesota Recovery Center. All around, it was a really interesting site visit, and something that I think provided our group with even more inspiration for our project. 

Although initially, I wasn’t very excited about my project of working to change perceptions of non-violent drug users, I have become more passionate about it as we’ve moved forward in our design process. We’ve researched some ways to design for change, and something that I’ve seen work a lot are documentaries. Documentaries have the power to inspire great social change in America and around the world. Take for example the documentary, SuperSize Me which followed a man as he ate strictly McDonald’s for a whole month and eventually got the fast food chain to pull the Supersize option from its menu. I think a documentary is ultimately what we will pursue in this project as people are beginning to watch them a lot more, and when the message is powerful enough it can upset people and be a driver for change. We hope to change society’s perception of non-violent drug users and in turn get them to influence their law makers to promote overall change in America. 

I thought this week’s guest presenter from Glitch was super interesting. To take a student group and make it into an actual business was something that I think is difficult with little money, but fascinating to try. They aren’t really interested in making money, they just want to bring a lot of people who are interested in the same thing together. That is truly a design for change. I’m curious to see if they are pursuing putting together some sort of global initiative to try and expand this concept beyond Minneapolis. I think the presenter from Glitch was a good speaker because it really showed our group how to start our Project 3. We have an interesting project where we have to look at the social norms around non-violent drug users, and I think we can follow some of the same techniques Glitch does and help to bring people together around a common issue.

I enjoyed the first round of presentations (Project 1) a lot, because there were just so many ideas, and people went about the project so differently. This project was  a little different as it was in a team, and teams were only working on one idea, but I again enjoyed hearing the different paths that teams took with this project, and how some ideas were so different. One team even went so far to actually develop an app. Although group projects are often difficult in college because there are often group members who don’t exactly pull their weight, I always tend to enjoy working in teams. Hearing everybody’s ideas and watching people piggy-back off one another is fascinating. During the lecture that we had on sustainability, our team got to thinking about how we could make our product more sustainable, and we went from one idea to another until we found out that one of our members worked at a solar panel company, and we could put solar panels on our prototypes and test them with focus groups! It was awesome to see that process played out right in front of us. Overall I thought this project was a good experience where I was able to further my skills and make a prototype I was proud of.

Over the duration of this course, and specifically during the past couple of weeks leading up to the completion of this project, I have felt myself rely on my design skills that I have acquired through this course. Whether it’s learning more about how the best ideas truly do come from a team, or learning how to do the necessary market research before beginning prototyping, this class has taught me a lot. I think my Market Research class that I’m taking right now has done a really good job of sort of going hand in hand with this class. In that class, I get to focus on finding out what consumers want, and how much they are willing to pay to get it. In this class, I get to focus on ideating after doing that market research and creating initial product concepts. This is sort of the ideal career for me. Something where I get to do market research, talk to consumers, and figure out where their needs and desires truly lie, but also where I get to use that research I just did and come up with some excellent products.

The more experience I get in teams in college, the more I find that diversity does nothing but contribute to success. In high school, I worked exclusively with people who were pretty much the same person as me. Our city was 96.9% white, so I worked pretty exclusively with people who were white. I never really noticed it at the time, but now that I have had experience with diversity here at the University of Minnesota, I realize that those high school teams never really achieved their potential. In college, due to diverse teams and diverse ideas, I have seen teams start with one good idea, and build on it so well since people have such different experiences, and can bring those experiences to look at problems in different ways. I am excited to continue to work with my design team. I believe we have a diverse crew from different cultures and different places in the United States. We have already taken our idea (shoe organizer) and built it into something special that I am excited to prototype and bring to fruition. I someday hope to have a career working with teams that are diverse because I enjoy meeting new types of people and hearing their ideas.