The evaluation stage of the design thinking process was probably my favorite stage so far. Being able to explain our idea from our persona to prototype really allowed us to see how far we’ve come in just a short amount of time. Knowing how much work we have put into our idea made me proud and excited to share it with our classmates and EPs. Before heading into the pitch day on Friday, I think it was helpful to get feedback from our class in a smaller setting. They asked insightful questions and gave us potential changes to our concept that we hadn’t thought about before, which allowed us to test out those ideas on the other class and EPs the next day. One thing that worried me initially was hearing how other groups’ ideas happened to be quite similar to ours when pitching our ideas to the class. However, I tried to push that thought out of my mind, knowing that once people heard from both groups, the two ideas were different enough that people were able to distinguish our thought processes from theirs.
When it came to pitch day on Friday, I wasn’t super excited in the beginning about having to present, but I think the community feel of having all groups present at once eased my initial nerves. It was a lot more informal than I realized, and it was nice being able to have a more diverse range of perspectives from people who had never seen our idea before. As time progressed, I was able to figure out the best way to deliver the information in the best way possible, attempting to tweak words along the way. It allowed me to be more confident in myself that I was able to pitch the idea well enough so that people could understand it. Overall, I learned that pitching an idea for 45 minutes straight can be quite tiring, but in the end it’s a really rewarding experience.
The EPs were a little intimidating at first, bringing in background knowledge from their industry and probing us with questions that we may not have had quick and simple answers to. They pushed us to think on our feet and even admit that we hadn’t thought about specific ideas before. One major example of this was the potential liability of cross-contamination of bring-your-own containers. Multiple people brought this up to us, and it is such a simple problem that we had yet to think about. In our session following the pitch day, we then had the ability to think about how we best wanted to approach this problem, which ended up leading us to modify our concept of how to contain our products. Most importantly, we received a lot of overall positive feedback for our concept and prototype, and the majority of people loved the idea and some people even said they could see themselves using the kiosk. After pitch day, when it came to assessing all of the feedback, we were able to converge on a few key ideas about the kiosk that we think can be modified in order to address substantial liabilities and concerns. Pitching our idea to other people really helped us perfect our concept in ways that we wouldn’t have thought about otherwise.
I also really enjoyed getting to hear the other classes’s ideas for their companies. All the groups put in a lot of effort and have created cool ideas to help their respective companies become more sustainable. It was really interesting that there were multiple groups who focused on the airline and hotel industries. The most unique idea in my opinion was Chipotle–they really thought out of the box and used one of their “wild” ideas to not only help make stores more sustainable but involve customers in the process as well. I’m glad I got to take part in this experience and I really enjoyed myself!