It was the day of our partner pitch. We all needed to get up around 6 to catch the train to the design week in Eindhoven, but before we got the chance to extend our knowledge with the workshops and exhibitions, we needed to stop by our product owner’s house in Tilburg. We could take a seat on the couch in his living room, and we connected with Barcelona and Bangalore to present our findings from the last 3 weeks.
We got a short moment to present our new problem formulations, too bad we were bound to a tight schedule because of the workshops we wanted to attend at the design week. We gave the dog a quick pet and hopped in the car to Eindhoven. In retrospect this day could be seen as an important day for the team. Interesting lectures about: design for behavior change, product design for the circular economy, and most important: the consumer perception of refurbished smartphones.
The woman talking about this had just graduated from TU Delft, and explained how consumers generally perceive refurbished smartphones, and especially what their reasons are to buy these devices. According to her research, the consumers accept the product because of the price, not because they are aware it is beneficial for the environment. Incentivizing people through good bargains seemed more important, than sketching the sustainable picture.
An other design scholar – Sander Hermsen – talked about the ways design can influence people’s behavior for the better. Some behavior is related to being uninformed or creating your own stories about your behavior (related to our subject: people keep their smartphone in a drawer without recycling, and – for example – make up a story like “one day I might need it”). Hermsen concluded that there are many factors influencing people’s behavior so all of them need to be taken in account when products or strategies are designed to change behavior.
The last session was all about brainstorming; here we provided Phillips with some insights and ideas for the potential products. The subject revolved around the sharing economy, and we tried finding new things that could be shared. Sporting equipment? One alarm system for the whole neighborhood? Refurbishing your old pots and pans and reselling them? Not sure if it these ideas were the start of a disruptive future, but we carefully observed their brainstorming methods and we used the same method with our peers at the MediaLab.
This is an important time for the project; we are going to develop prototypes for possible solutions. We got some of our own ‘big ideas’, but also input of our peers, and we visualized other initiatives that are already existing. With this knowledge we’re making a good chance of creating a relevant prototype to present for the next sprint.
Existing initiatives and their relation to different categories