<aside> 🍎 TECHIN 521 Design Thinking: This studio-based course was taught by Sarah Zuberec. She brought her 20+ years of experience as a Product Manager and Designer from Microsoft and Amazon to create a course where we apply systems thinking, user centered design and critical thinking while working in interdisciplinary teams. The course has a strong focus on challenging existing biases and mindsets to approach problem solving in a different way.
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During the course of 10 weeks, my team and I were tasked with creating a solution that helped households reduce their carbon emissions. We learned that trips to and from the grocery store contribute 17 million metric tonnes of carbon emissions each year. After conducting user research in the form of observation, surveys, and user testing, we created a low-fidelity prototype for a community based grocery delivery service for suburbs around Seattle. Residents can request their neighbors to pick up and drop off items from the store. In exchange, neighbors who deliver the items earn points to request deliveries of their own. This page outlines our process in researching the problem space and creating this solution.
Our team met approximately two times a week to work on this project. Our meetings earlier in the quarter tended to be in person especially while the project lacked definition. During these in person meetings we would spend time using the whiteboard to brainstorm ideas and think visually. As our project gained definition, our collaboration style shifted to virtual meetings. We frequently used Google Meets in conjunction with tools like Google Docs, Figma, and Google Jamboard to collaborate.
<aside> 💡 Design Question: How can we reduce last-mile emissions for Gen X people living in suburban Seattle areas when buying groceries?
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We conducted secondary research to identify a problem and define our design question. We found that significant carbon emissions come from people driving to the grocery store.