GSIF Post 4

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

We feel that for something to be uniquely ours 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 
    • Interact with mothers and other members of families who may play a factor in the decision of purchasing our products

 

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 

The purpose of our research is to nutrient-dense foods to alleviate malnutrition in Sierra Leone in children 6 months to 5 years. We want to see if women and children in Sierra Leone like our products and if they would be successful as a treatment for chronic malnutrition in children. Their feedback will help us make ingredient choices and create successful business and marketing plans.

Furthermore, 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 and cost needs to answer our two main questions of our research.

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. Children are critical to our research because they are the target audience of the products. Our recipes are designed to treat micronutrient deficiencies in children between six months and five years old. It is essential that we have a better understanding of whether or not children in Sierra Leone like our products before we finalize our recipes. Mothers will be asked to consent to the children’s taste-testing. 

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.

One of the first things I learned at Lehigh is the idea the possibility of exploring multidisciplinary pathways, which I am practicing through my pre-medical track and art major. I have learned that there is value to having diverse academic interests because it allows one to look at new ideas through different perspectives. Something else I learned was that American culture is truthfully extremely different from cultures around the world. I went to Switzerland for winter break, and although we had the same privileges as we do in America, the culture is different, especially around the purpose of life and responsibility as a citizen. Finally, I learned the importance of any experience abroad as a tourist and a citizen. Both experiences are completely different, and having an experience abroad as a citizen with friends from such a country are integral to truly learning the country’s different culture and traditions

1 Comment on GSIF Post 4

  1. lef219
    February 17, 2020 at 6:48 pm (4 years ago)

    Great, detailed responses. For your design process I would be sure to think through all the way from beginning to end, as the empathize-define-ideate-prototype-test model shared in class does. I think you have the right elements there, just establish how one will lead to the other to create the process.

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