1. Based on your life experiences, skills, and interests, what would a design process that is both uniquely yours and effective look like?
- Empathize: People are exposed to an existing issue or system that brings them dissatisfaction or empathy towards the situation. People involved start to build up a desire and passion to take action in order to make an impactful change on the existing system in hopes of a better situation.
- Explore: People investigate the current issue in-depth to see the big picture. People gain an understanding of the five Ws & H(who, what, when, where, why, and how) towards the situation.
- Define: People pinpoint and clearly define the problem that resulted in the existence of the current situation.
- Ideate/Research: Develop initial ideas to combat the problem. Conduct research to determine whether or not similar problems exist(ed) in other areas and determine whether an existing solution has been applied. Develop a finalized solution to tackle the problem with initial ideas and information gathered from research.
- Prototype: Develop a prototype of the solution. Document and take note of any issue that arises from the production process.
- Test: Conduct a trail of the solution in a small scale setting. Get the community involved in the trial for feedbacks. Make adjustments and changes according to the feedback. Repeat steps five and six as needed.
- Implementation: Implement the solution at full scale. Make minor adjustments as needed.
- Feedback: Generate feedback from the community on the solution implemented. Look for improvement opportunities on the solution that was implemented. Communicate problems and solutions online for other communities to reference.
Identify your three most important stakeholders and list five UNIQUE attributes for each one of them.
1. Entrepreneurs/Junk Shop
- Demographics: Filipino, small business owners
- Socio-Economics: Lower class and low-income members of society
- Geographic: Philippines. Climate conditions are rainy and windy. manila consists of 1.78 million people.
- Psychological Variable: Business owner sees value and business opportunity in the trash that is generated.
- Behavioral: Business owners participate in dumpster diving or buys valuable trash from other Filipino.
2. Nanays
- Demographic: Middle-age married Filipino
- Socio-Economic: Nanays are often unemployed and a part of the lower-income class.
- Geographic: Philippines. Climate is rainy and windy. Manila is composed of 1.78 million people.
- Psychological Variables: Middle-age women who have fulfilled their parental roles and are seeking employment to improve their quality of life.
- Behavioral: Nanays live on sachets sized household goods due to low or no income.
3. NGOs
- Demographics: Filipinos of all occupations
- Socio-Economic: People from all classes and income level are a part of the NGO
- Geographic: Philippines. Climates are rainy and windy. Currently 1.78 million people live in Manila.
- Psychological Variables: People band together in pursuit of achieving a common goal such as deviating plastic from the environment.
- Behavioral: NGO members are reducing and reusing plastic in their day-to-day life
3. Identify three ways in which you will validate your project concept, technology, usability, and business model.
- Conduct experimentation to determine the allowable contamination level in recycled plastics for building blocks. This investigation is crucial to ensure that infrastructures created from our building blocks do not collapse. It also determines the maximum level of contamination we can have in each block.
- Determine whether or not the junk shop business and market are willing to invest in our injection molding machinery for the production of recycled plastic products through research.
- Create prototypes of building blocks to test how they fasten with each other and whether or not they are secure and sturdy. The plastic’s flexible properties need to be considered in this process.
4. Give three examples of something very interesting you earned from a friend that was a completely alien concept to you.
- Hydropower is not renewable and can sometimes be dirtier than fossil fuel. Water released slowly from the dam leaves at high pressure and causes the turbines to turn. Over time, the opening for the waterway will eventually be covered by sediments and fail to operate. Removing the sediments is so costly that it is oftentimes not worth prolonging the life span of the hydropower facility. In addition, shallow dams allow the sun to react with the sediments which initiate methane production. Some locations produce so much methane that the facility is no longer producing clean energy.
- Currently, we are living on 10 species of bananas due to the massive cloning process.
- Most blue organisms in nature are actually not blue. Rather, the blue comes from the microstructure on the species body that causes the light reflection to appear blue. As a result, people think they see blue.