Week 7 - Ideation Phase + Presentations

This week, I finally entered the Ideation Phase which focuses on transforming learnings from the Inspiration Phase into opportunities for design. This stage involves generating ideas, prototyping, receiving feedback, iterating, and refining (IDEO.org, 2015). As it was the week of presenting to our stream partner, Diversity Works NZ, I had to speed run the early parts of this stage to ensure that I had a final idea for what I planned to prototype in order for them to give me helpful feedback.

To start this off, I completed the Download Your Learnings exercise where I put all the key information that I learnt from the Ideation Phase, based on what I thought could potentially inform my prototype.

The second exercise was Find Themes where I analysed the most recurring ideas within the Download Your Learnings exercise - this resulted in three main themes: trust and transparency, negative perception and attitude, and lack of food allergy management.

Next up was the Brainstorm exercise. Based on the three themes, I created a ‘How might we…’ question for each of them, and tried to generate as many ideas as possible.

My final idea is a food allergy certification, which involves the following:

• Training programme: Externally provided by my certification company which includes modules introducing food allergies, effective allergen communication, cross contamination, emergency response, and example scenarios.

• Emergency Kit: Includes emergency medication like EpiPen, antihistamines, and a symptom communication chart.

• Allergy management toolkit: Includes resources like colour coded tickets for when serving allergen-friendly dishes, and allergen cards to improve communication between customers, BOH, and FOH staff.

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The employees will learn how to use the tools provided within the training programme. I’m yet to decide the specifics of what I will be prototyping from the above.

At the end of the week, I had my presentation and the feedback I received was:

• Emphasise that food allergies are considered an invisible disability to address the brief and make sure it’s coming from a DEI lens

• My current idea is more health and safety focused rather than DEI

• The changes I want to make or the issue I’m tackling could be done at a policy level, and that I should somehow advocate for policy changes within food establishments 

  
  

Feelings

Download Your Learnings: Again, I arrived at the same issue of not knowing what was ‘key’ also because I had done an extensive amount of research so it was hard to filter through everything. This was particularly stressful because I tried to categorise my learnings into three categories, however, a lot of them overlapped.

Find Themes: I was particularly looking forward to this exercise as I knew that it would help narrow things down for me and show me on the key aspects of my issue that I need to focus on. When elaborating on each theme, this was the first time in a while that I felt confident with what I was writing because I was using all my learnings to justify myself and the direction of my project became clearer. 

Brainstorm: Starting this activity was slightly daunting because it was the part where I had to expand again and prepare to be overwhelmed. I found this really difficult because I couldn’t think of many ideas and this was a few hours before our presentation slides to the partners was due. Bad time management again, my bad! I felt like I was speed running this whole process too much and that I wasn’t changing my ideas enough, or they weren’t unique or different to each other. For trust and transparency, a certification was still the top and first idea that I had. For negative perception and attitude, a campaign was still the main idea but ideating for how I would specifically execute this was hard. This was when I realised, after talking to my friend, that if I do a campaign, it’s supposed to be targeted towards the food establishments to raise awareness and direct them to take action rather than aiming my campaign at the general public. In hindsight, it was so obvious that it had to be directed to my chosen workplace because that’s literally the entire brief, but for some reason it only clicked now. Due to this, I’ve decided I won’t do a campaign as it would be more challenging to address food establishments with the current time I have left. Regarding lack of food allergy management, I came up with a lot of ideas, but they seemed quite similar, or too micro? Some seemed like they were just an extension of another idea and that I was just listing down random useless solutions. 

Feedback: I think overall, my feedback from Diversity Works NZ and my lecturer were generally positive. Regarding policy changes, I wasn’t sure what to think of this because I’m pretty limited for my capstone, like obviously I can’t create a policy and I also don’t know how I would prototype advocating for policy change. I will say, it did annoy me slightly that they thought it was too health and safety focused rather than DEI - although I do understand where they’re coming from.

Evaluation

• Download Your Learnings: This exercise didn’t go so well because of the bad categorisation. I think that the purpose of this exercise is good, however I think it needs to have more specific prompts or ways to organise learnings. 

• Brainstorm: The intention for having three separate sections in this exercise was so that I’d have three different aspects of my prototype. This went well because it ensures that each part of my prototype has a specific goal and is addressing my problem accurately. Deciding not to do the campaign was a good idea because it meant that I had one less thing to focus on in terms of what I would prototype but part of me felt like I was backtracking and that some of the work I had done was wasted. I only got feedback from a few people regarding the lack of food allergy management section as it had the most ideas that I was open to choosing from. This went well because it made me realise that the ideas I had were actually useful. Additionally, I discussed with my tutor after my presentation about how I was worried I wasn’t changing my idea enough, because I know that it’s a problem I have, getting stuck on ideas, and resisting change. However, it got to the point where I was trying to force change when it didn’t need to happen as my tutor said that the reason why it didn’t change is probably because it means that the prototype is necessary to address the issues in food establishments. 

  • Reassured and got a different perspective

  • From the presentation, I will take all of it on board as I agree with all of it to a certain degree. 

  • use policy thing as a call to action in the report not prototype

• Current challenges? Navigate their feedback and learn how i will move forward with it. Still shows how people don’t think its a dei issue and i really have to focus on how i can convey that it is, so communication is a key aspect

  
  

Analysis

• Download your learnings - Maybe because my categorising wasn’t good and too broad

• Themes - filtered out the nitty gritty and allowed me to focus on what matters the most for customers with food allergies.  

• Feedback - Use stronger dei language to push and emphasise that its a dei issue

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• If my solution was essentially the same, but revolved around a different disability, then I don’t think they would’ve made the same comment. It’s just because my disability is in a different context to what is typically thought, so they see it differently. These days, many places are wheelchair accessible because these people have the right to access any place. Yet, why aren’t restaurants more accessible to those with food allergies, when it’s a disability that literally revolves around food?

• It felt good to get feedback for once because most of the exercises beforehand felt like it was all me and i was getting sick of my own thoughts that i was driving myself insane

• Getting others’ opinions can open your mind