WEEK 5 - 'THE 4 HOUR SOCIAL IMPACT START-UP SPRINT' DESIGN CHALLENGE

This week’s lecture stood out from the others because it started off differently. All we knew from our lecturer Muireann was to bring our laptops, pens, pencils and paper, and meet at the far end of the campus. Initially, I thought that we were going to be sketching buildings as practice before the upcoming design trip to Berlin.

We were brought into a building that I’d never been in before. Then we were brought into a meeting room where a bunch of businesspeople were waiting for us. This week's class was a workshop called ‘The 4 Hour Social Impact Start-Up Sprint’. This workshop was being run by Blackbox. Blackbox is a design studio that works at the intersection of systems, strategy & storytelling (1).

Once we were all sat down inside, we were told that each table was a team. Each team consisted of 4-5 people. We were all going to be taking part in a 4-hour start-up design sprint. The team members in each team had to assign each other roles that they would have in a start-up. These roles included the CEO (The Visionary), CTO (The Innovator), CMO (The Marketer), and the Developer (The Maker). We were then given different areas of problems to solve, consisting mainly of health and wellbeing, electricity, and sanitation, and had to choose one area to focus on. The area that my team focused on was health and wellbeing, as did most of the other teams. We then had to brainstorm. I found this stage easy enough because ‘health and wellbeing’ is a big area, so we were able to think of many ideas. Next, we had to bundle our ideas into separate groups. These groups included products, technology, and systems. The next stage was dotmocracy. This was where each team member was given 5 sticky dots and we had to vote for our favourite ideas, and we had to go with the most voted idea.

When we’d finished creating a concept, and creating a pitch, almost 3 hours had passed, and it was time to pitch our ideas to 4 businesspeople from Blackbox, and to the rest of the class. My team pitched a system called ‘The Green Tick Initiative’ that aimed at providing a healthier environment online where people can take part in a scenario based training to understand how people may perceive a social media post or how to be more aware of what they are posting. Once the applicant has completed their training, they receive a green tick qualification which can be linked with their social media, and other social media users can see that this person’s postings aren’t damaging. At the end of the workshop, I was happy with how our presentation went. I believed that we explained our pitch in great detail and we got some good critique from the Blackbox businesspeople.

Overall, I thought this was a useful workshop. Before undertaking this workshop, I thought that a start-up for a product or system was a lot harder and more time consuming. Now, thanks to this workshop, I was surprised by how much you could get done in 4 hours. Also, I thought that the stages in Blackbox’s strategic design process that we used in this workshop were very beneficial and I will be using Blackbox’s strategic design process in the future.

References:

1. Blackbox (n.d.) 'Coming Soon' [website] (Accessed 4th April 2020); https://www.blackbox.studio/

Picture Reference:

Global Wellness Institute (n.d.) 'About the United Nations (UN) 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG's)' [website] (Accessed 4th April 2020);

https://globalwellnessinstitute.org/initiatives/17-sustainable-development-goals/