During my final undergrad year, I got the opportunity to do a 'Winternship' at Digital Imagination Studio California from Dec'18-Jan'19. As part of a 2-week project I worked on, I was responsible for organizing a brainstorming session among the designers.
Session Planning
Objectives: To be able to come up with ideas for using personal experiences to recommend food items to people. Duration: 1 Day
Mixed Method Approach: Brainstorming over food tied up with a participatory design approach to the solution.
Session Protocol: To study the influence of personal experience on the way people perceive food. The environment was chosen a nearby restaurant. People were asked to order what they would like to try from the menu and why.
Phase 1: After the dishes arrived the first phase of brainstorming started while they were experiencing their food. People were asked to talk about personal experiences of food in order to come up with dimensions to characterize it.
Phase 2: The participants were asked to prototype some concepts.
Obviously due to the time limitations of the project these dimensions aren't all-inclusive. But definitely, it helped them move further towards what their solution should look like
Phase 3: They were asked to test their interface by eating something new “papad” and then use the interface they created to describe it and pick something from the menu they don’t know and use your interface to describe it.
Phase 4: They were asked to re-evaluate and re-design their interfaces. This helped them have better clarity of their designs and whether their solution was actually going to work or not?
Impact: workshop facilitation, which enabled the creation of 4 personas and of characteristic dimensions of how people classify their food experience, and helping the designers come up with solutions and the re-iterate on it
Obviously, this is just a small part of the entire project. But get in touch for further details will be more than happy to share!
Here are some of the things my team has to say about my visit:
If you would like me to conduct such brainstorming sessions for your product or team or would just like to know how to conduct such sessions then do hit me up!