Blog 10: The Humbling Project

For most of my life I have been a "big picture" thinker. I day dream most of the day about inventions and new products or cool advertising campains. Usually, my ideas are things that I would want or things that I would buy if I saw them in the store. Needless to say, I was thrilled when we were assigned a project in which the objective was to design a new product or service for a segment of a population. After choosing the "empty nester" demographic, I immeadiately thought about products I would love when I am an empty nester. I pictured bird feeders with motion sensor cameras to capture images of the birds that come to feed when you are not at home. I pictured a backyard movie theater with projection on your house. But as the ideas flowed in, the project came to a surprising stop. Segmentation: Our first update was titled segmentation.
The first thing this project taught me was a useful brainstorming approach. Even though I like to jump into the big idea step of the process, I now understand a way to develop creative products that fit the needs and wants of the consumer. As we learned about our segment, through research methods and then evaluating our findings, we discovered facts about the target population. These facts uncovered the unmet needs of empty nesters, and from there we could develop a service that met those needs. Our final service idea was both creative and useful and something that the population actually wanted!
Another thing the project taught me was unfortunatley how easy it is to bias reasearch methods and results to meet the stereotypes you form in your head. Countless times, I would look at the our findings and be so inclined to change the results because I couldn't believe them. I believe this is where many inventors and product designers find themselves in a pickle. It seems easy to invent something that you would like even when you are trying to get in the mind of someone else, because, afterall, you still have your mind too. But, it is way more difficult to remove your mind from the equation. I had to humble myself in this case and realize that although I am a brilliant marketing major at the McCombs School of Business, I am still just a twenty-one-year-old who knows very little about what adults want and need. Our final service, backyard parties thrown for empty nesters and their friends, would never be something I would think of had we not gone through the research method. And even though it is still not the most cutting edge service, it fits perfectly with what they are looking for!
Working with a group on this project helped keep us accountable for actually responding to the data we were collecting. Without the group accountability, I think it would be much harder to keep myself from skewing the results to fit a product that I wanted to design. We had to learn the process together and each of our ideas came together at the end to produce the final service.
Working in this group project was much different than many of the other projects I have done in other business classes because it did have a more creative element. WIth a more creative element, there are more ideas flowing and more opportunities for regection of ideas. One things we had to all cope with was taking all ideas into consideration and seeing if we could use them in the final project. Many times we could not, and I learned that it is more difficult for me to take constructive critism on creativity than most other areas of my life. It was a very important lesson learned, and I have also learned that not all of my ideas are the best or most creative or most relevant. It was a humbling experience, and I am glad I learned it now!