This blog post reports on work-in-progress within the DfG course! The post is written by one of the two groups addressing the Finnish Competition and Consumer Authority’s brief on ‘Boosting Consumer Rights’. The group includes Jiyoung Son and Xuyang Zhang from the MA Collaborative and Industrial Design program, Linh Duong from Corporate Communication program, David Martens from Master of European Design program and Tiina Alanko from Social and Public Policy program of the University of Helsinki.
After the Mid-Review presentation, our journey towards the final proposition started. We already knew the problem and had some understanding of the reasons behind it. Now it is time to look for solutions.
We went through the interview notes for a deeper analysis – is there something we missed earlier that could be useful for us? We used the Affinity Diagram to interpret our data. The Affinity Diagram is a common method of design thinking to organise facts, observations and insights of research. We clustered post-it notes again and again, to find wider themes that emerged from our research.
The following week, the fun part started – ideation! We used themes that we found using the Affinity Diagram and chose the most productive and suitable ones, like “Education”, “Accessibility” and “Translation of Law”. After that, each of us wrote as many ideas as possible in 10 minutes. There were absolutely no limits – we had wild ideas from hi-tech solutions (like a translator pen) to hiring a comedian, who would help re-brand consumer rights.
We clustered ideas under wider themes and evaluated them according to effect and impact as well as cost and time. We ended up with three most promising ideas: Starter Package for New Entrepreneurs, Mentoring program and Central Checkpoint. After discussion, we decided to choose the Starter Pack idea because it fits well into our earlier focus –the new entrepreneur’s path.
Recently we have combined individual ideas and created new ones, had supportive tutorials with teachers and learned new things about behavioural insights. We also decided that we still want to work together with our stakeholders, so we settled the meeting with Nina Jokela and Sakari Seppälä from FCCA. After Vappu celebrations we had a great session with them at the FCCA’s office in Hakaniemi. Nina and Sakari really engaged themselves to our ideas and spent a lot of time to take a closer look at our prototypes. They gave us plenty of good viewpoints and tips for the final proposition.
And here we are now – our proposal of Consumer Rights Covered -program for New Entrepreneurs is becoming more concrete every day. It has taken a lot of post-its, coffee and debates, but we are sincerely proud of it. Now we keep on prototyping and preparing for the upcoming Final Presentation!
The DfG course runs for 14 weeks each spring – the 2019 course has now started and runs 26 Feb to 21 May. It’s an advanced studio course in which students work in multidisciplinary teams to address project briefs commissioned by governmental ministries in Finland. The course proceeds through the spring as a series of teaching modules in which various research and design methods are applied to addressing the project briefs. Blog posts are written by student groups, in which they share news, experiences and insights from within the course activities and their project development. More information here about the DfG 2019 project briefs. Hold the date for the public finale 09:00-12:00 on Tuesday 21 May!