Evelyn Velasquez-Moreno

Professor Khanjan Mehta 

CINQ-388

14 February 2020 

Blog Post #4

Based on your life experience, skills and interests, what would a design process that is both uniquely yours and effective look like? 

One design process would be to create a study that works toward research in our project of addressing malnutrition in children under the age of five years old. These research designs would contribute to background, purpose of research, questions and hypothesis; our design would provide information on reliability and validity on each measure based on data. In addition, our project would contribute to taste-testing, sampling or recruiting participants, and making sure we have the right supplements/ingredients for our recipes. 

Identify your three most important stakeholders and list five UNIQUE attributes for each one of them. 

 

• Mothers and their Children:

 

• • • Will be the ones using our product the most, even though it’s available to everyone in Sierra Leone
    • Their feedback will be most important
    • Greatest need for product
    • Their feedback will help us make ingredient choices and create successful business and marketing plans 
    •  Main drive/motivation behind our entire project
      • Mothers with children will be approached and asked if they are interested in participating in our research 
      • Children are critical to our research because they are the target audience of the products 

 

• Vendors:

 

• • • Will be selling our product and getting it out into the market
    • Will be our partners in this venture
    • Are going to help a lot in marketing the product
    • The vendors will be those who are responsible for integrating our product into the village’s culture
    • They will be the image of our product when mothers buy them

 

• Bakers:

 

• • Will be making our product before it goes to be sold
  • Partnership with them is one of the most valuable because without them, we can’t move forward in our venture at all
  • Provide them with our ingredients/recipes/preservatives 
  • Our best insight on local cuisine and our first impression of the products; they legitimize the cultural immersion we are trying to instill with our project
  • Responsible for the quality control of the product

Identify three ways in which you will validate your project concept, technology, usability, and business model.

Three ways in which we will validate our project concept is through the usage of human subjects research– provide information on the reliability and validity of each measure. We will have references or results prior to each measure; and we will work towards stating the details of the statistical or qualitative analysis that we will use to analyze this data. 

1. We will have a questionnaire that we will use for mothers in Sierra Leone that will be used to get a better understanding of their family’s daily lives and whether they would buy our products. The questionnaire will give us feedback on the recipes. 
2. Taste-Testing: During each interview, we will ask participants’ children to try our three products. For the children, we will observe their facial expression and reaction to each food. For children 18 months and younger, we will rely on behavioral observations and the help of their mothers to gauge whether or not they like each food they try. 
3. Our plan is to recruit participants through the help of World Hope International (WHI), a non-profit organization located in Makeni, Sierra Leone. We have worked most closely with Allieu Bangura, Global Director of Health and Nutrition at WHI. The pre-established relationship will help us build trust with members of the community. WHI and previous student researchers in Sierra Leone have recommended that this be our plan for recruiting participants, and they have explained that this is the most effective way to interact with people in Sierra Leone. 

4. Give three examples of something very interesting you learned from a friend that was a completely alien concept to you.

1. Perspective: Learning to adapt in a foreign country
   1. Although I was born in the United States, at the age of four, my parents and I moved to Mexico. I lived in Mexico for three years– I went to school here and learned to adapt to my own environment through communicating with adults and other children my age in school. By the time I turned seven, I moved back to the United States, where I had to learn to adapt to my new environment. Although it was a complete culture shock, I eventually learned to speak English through communicating with friends who taught me how to read, write and speak. They read books with me and helped me with the English alphabet. Gradually, my English began to build up, and I learned to interact with other children and adults through the support and help of my friends. 
2. Idea: When I was five years old, my father taught me how to use cow poop for fertilizers. Growing up in Mexico, my father owned a papaya farm, where he used plenty of cow and horse poop to fertilize the soil in order to raise his crops. He taught me how to fertilize fields and harvest through strange methods, as well as how to carefully pick the papayas.
3. Religion: Growing up, I did not know much about different cultures and religions. I grew up Christian in Mexico, where I only focused on practicing one specific religion. When I moved to the United States, I learned about the religion of Islam through a Muslim friend. She talked to me about the Qur’an, which is something close to the Bible– something that I too could relate to practicing and reading in my religion. In addition, I learned about their 5 Pillars, which made me think about my own practices as well in the Christian religion. In terms of the 5 Pillars, she taught me about their practices of fasting and Ramadan. I soon began to become more familiar and open-minded about the different civilizations that practice their religions around the world, while growing up in the United States. Today, I am a Religious Studies minor.