Entrepreneurial design - Week 1
So last Wednesday, Jan 14th, we started with 'THE' class of the semester 'Entrepreneurial design'. I had heard about this class when I went to the school for the first time ever, in the summers of 2014 after being accepted for the course. The entire concept for a $1000 project seemed exciting and challenging at the same time. Exciting because this is something that would push me into actually DOING something of my own as a business. Giving it a shot and learning what it takes to have something delivered to your customers is Challenging, it doesn't come easy. Coming up with the idea of what you want to build and then the process of getting to the final product and being convinced about it by yourselves is the first big milestone. Next, comes the scalability aspect of catering to your customers with the promised quality and within the promised time frame. These were some of my after-thoughts when I heard about this course even before I joined the program. Time and again, we spoke about this in class during fall'14 semester, heard it from the second-years who had fun working on their projects, some skipped their interns and chose to spend their summers continuing to work on their entrepreneurial design project and making it ready-to-ship to their customers. Exciting isn't it? Very fulfilling too, especially if it's you first shot at doing something of your own, like it's going to be for me.
Back to class, 14 Jan, Leland, Gary & Christina introduced us to the course with a quick outline of what to expect in the next few weeks and how to go about it. To get us started they introduced us a post-it ideation technique, I'll call it "Action verbs & Audiences". This is how it works -- to begin with if you have no idea where to start or what space you want to work in, you put the first 10 actions and 10 audiences that come to your mind on post-its and then randomly pick one post-it from each category and think of a product, an event, a service or an app around it. The exercise kind of opens you to think aloud. Keep aside some set ideas you might have (which may be great, but it's always worthwhile to give a fresh thought at things and may be go back to the old ones if you still feel strongly convinced about them). I had fun doing the action-verb exercise. Some of the combinations I came up with were "Sniffing - Readers", "Tweaking-Loners", "Thinking-Drivers". To me these combinations were exciting enough to think wild. I know on my own I couldn't have come up with these otherwise. Here are few of the pair & the ideas I came up with during this class workshop.
Next, I went through the class readings and the previous year projects. And then again got back to paper noting down everything that interested me, everything that personally I would love to have or create, something I could relate to, games I played as a child. This helped be brainstorm a few more ideas and arrive at themes that were common to those ideas . Memories formed the core of most of the ideas that I came up. One of them is a game often played in families in India 'Dumb Charades'. The game is about acting a movie name & others have to guess it. Here is a link of how it is played. Few other ideas were about documenting trips based on my personal habit of collecting boarding passes, bus tickets, event tickets & even restaurant bills and signing it with a note. And sometimes, having someone accompanying me write a note & sign it. To me that it just a nice way of treasuring that memory and going back to it once in a while. Few other ideas that i came up with included 'photoLike', a card game of your FB/Instagram photos, where the players bet for the number of 'likes' the photo would have got (on the service) and the one who is closest to the actual 'likes' wins the bet and collects the 'Likes' others had put in the bet. At the end of the game the one with maximum number of 'Likes' wins. The idea excited me, i thought it might be fun to make something like this and see how people reacted. I just floated it around with a couple of classmates. They didn't really felt about it as much as I did. Still, I haven't give up on this idea. It is still on my consideration and I see potential in this concept as a way of bringing photos in physical form back in homes & have people enjoy them with a tinge of social media trends. Some others on similar lines where an idea on 'CalendarPost'. 'Time-hop' postcards - a subscription based service to send as surprise memory cards to your loved ones around the same date/ week you met them in the last year or two. Another, area that came up often in the ideation was something to do with my love for tea and food. I thought of this idea, what if I design dinning table matts with recipes printed on them for amateur cooks like me . I could start with Indian dishes and then look at exploring other cuisines based on a few experiments with my friends from different part of the world. Exciting? emm....
As of now, I have a few thoughts or may be a few directions I am inclined towards. I need to probably pick one I strongly feel about and flesh it out to something more tangible and go with my gut before I share it with some people and see how they respond to it. Here are the scribbles from my second ideation.
Let's see how my first entrepreneurial adventure shapes from here.
