OpenIDEO

What is OpenIDEO?

Founded in 2010, OpenIDEO—IDEO’s open innovation practice—enables people worldwide to come together and build solutions for today’s toughest societal problems. Online and around the globe, OpenIDEO works with world-class partners to convene diverse communities that collectively develop ideas and accelerate social innovation. OpenIDEO’s platform expands on the power of crowd-sourcing, equipping participants with resources, connections, and design tools to create real impact. After tackling dozens of topics ranging from food waste to girls’ education to Ebola, people everywhere are designing a better future with OpenIDEO. ¹

My Experience

After deciding I wanted to participate in one of the open challenges on OpenIDEOs site, I needed to find a partner. Lucky for me it didn’t take long to find someone also wanting to participate in Austin.

The challenge we participated in was sponsored by Acumen and IDEO which made this free course feel professional and worthwhile. I was excited to learn more about design thinking which IDEO is known for.

【1】 Make It Real

Our first workshop consisted of an introduction to OpenIDEO and the challenge we would be participating in. The instructor gave us a packet of PDFs which included:

• Course Roadmap
• Workshop Guide
• Readings

Our class began with an introduction to human centered design and why prototyping was an important activity when exploring new ideas to problem solve. Prototypes enable rapid testing and illicit feedback due to being in the hands of the user.

After the introduction was complete, my partner and I went through some ice breaker exercises to get familiar with one another. After the ice-breaker we did a warm up exercise. Once settled in we began jotting down ideas and putting sticky notes all over our workspace. This exercise was good because it set the expectation for what we would be doing later.

With our warm up complete it was time to focus on our challenge.

Our homework for the next class was to brainstorm ideas centered around How might we improve health in everyday places?. We could then turn our ideas into prototypes and test them in the real world. My partner and I decided to meet up again and work through some ideas.

Working through our problem gave us many ideas given the different contexts we could consider. After our brainstorm we settled on Friendly Forage. Our solution to improving health in everyday places consisted of a mobile app which users could purchase and list community sourced produce.

We felt that by providing a platform we could connect communities through healthy food. People in a community with small gardens could post produce for sale to buyers within that community.

【2】 Build to Think

After we presented our idea, we began a new exercise to help us validate our idea, journey mapping. A journey map is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal. ²

We got a chance to think through essential elements of our idea before we build it. By identifying who our solution was for, defining what outcomes we wanted, and breaking our idea down into essential moments, we were able to focus our prototyping efforts.

After working through the journey map we took some time to reflect on what we learned. One thing we learned was how important user feedback can be. Sharing our idea with others helped us uncover hidden details we missed.

Once we gathered feedback on our idea, it was time to refine our journey map. How were we going to engage our community? We thought about what services we could leverage such as nextdoor.com to reach the hyper-local audience we were seeking. This was a shift in our thinking. We needed a way to build an awareness of our app and then create advocates through social media.

【3】 Plan for Field Tests

Our next experience prototyping was focused on planning. How would our prototype look at the farmers market? We took sometime and created a sketch to give us an idea of how we could organize our space.

Once our rough plan was created, we took time to go deep and refine our plan to make sure we weren’t forgetting anything once we got into the field to test. Considering the who, the what, the where at a deep level helped us gain a realistic understanding of our prototype through a lense other than our own.

• What roles would we need to fill when we test our prototype?
• Who would we try to target and how?
• Do we need a booth?

【4】 In the Field

With our refined plan we headed to a local farmers market to get feedback on our idea. We found the farmers market to be a great place to get feedback on our ideas as there were many local vendors selling various produce and other products.

We politely engaged with vendors and consumers asking them questions about Friendly Forage. Here was some of the feedback we collected:

• How does pickup and delivery work? Is there delivery?
• What if my produce is bad when it is delivered?
• Is there a process to becoming a seller on friendly forage?

After collecting our feedback we left the farmers market with a very different perspective than when we started. All of our assumptions were quickly validated, which proved to us that our idea needed deeper investigation if we were going to have a successful product idea.

Conclusion

Overall, the OpenIDEO experience was humbling to say the least. If you are looking for a great crash course in design thinking, this is it. With the help of my teammate, we were able to generate ideas and validate them not only within our group but to the actual audience who might one day use our product.

Since I had this experience, I have been using design thinking more in my career. This process has helped me understand the importance of empathy, feedback and testing to validate ideas and check assumptions.