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

I feel that for something to be uniquely mine (and my group’s) is something that hasn’t been done before, and for it to be effective it has to treat the problem properly. For example, we are working on different recipes, all created by people in our group, making them unique to us. They are affordable and nutrient-dense foods that mothers can purchase for their children, making them as effective as they are unique.

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 kids:
  • 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. Children that are a little older can make decisive ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers, but we will most likely still need to observe their behavior to understand if they like or dislike our recipes.
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 Makeni. 

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

Honestly, this question took me a lot of time to think about. It was really difficult to think about a time I learned something that wasn’t taught in a classroom. Looking back on my life, I thought of some random, simple things that at the point in time I learned them, it was completely alien to me. I apologize in advance for how silly they may seem, but they really were totally new and exciting to me in the moment. For example, when I was about 4 years old, I had a family friend of mine teach me how to tie my shoes. She was maybe 16 years old or something. As silly as it sounds, as a 4 year old, tying shoes was really alien to me. What do you mean, shoes that don’t have velcro exist? I was so confused by this one simple thing, but then I learned how to do it myself. Something else I learned from a friend was how to tell which months had up to 30 days and which had 31 days. I was about 8 years old when I learned this. Have you ever seen the knuckle trick where you count the months on your knuckles? You use your fingers to count the months of the year on and between your knuckles, and every month that lands on a knuckle has 31 days and every one that lands on a groove in between your knuckles is 30 days or less. Seemingly simple, but honestly something I use to this day. Lastly, something I learned from a friend that was completely alien to me is how to code. When taking Engineering 10, I had no idea what I was doing, like at all. It was something I had never done before. The way Matlab worked was completely foreign to me, so my boyfriend helped me outside of class and explained to me a bit more how it works. Even though I’m not an amazing coder, he taught me some basic concepts that now make a bit more sense to me.