Last september I  started the minor ‘Designful Innovation For One Billion People’. Now 5 months later I am looking back from what I’ve learned in this minor course. It was a journey of finding an innovative idea that suits 1 billion people. It wasn’t easy to find the right idea because you have to look at different perspectives like there are cultures where people have not always the same motivations. So, I challenged myself to find the right idea and used a lot of methods to find useful insights.

What’s innovation?
What I have learned is that innovation is not always about improve existing products but more about how to change the meaning of a product. The difference between incremental and radical changes is that radical is doing something completely new. For example how the Nintendo Wii changes the use of a game console. This change helped me a lot to think in a new way for example in new services and not to make existing products better.

Finding insights
For the minor we had to create a innovative idea for at least one billion people. My question was; where do I have to start? So I started to do a little desk-research about trends and problems. I set up a little survey about ‘How do people make choices’ because I think today we are standing for many choices in our lives. The result was interesting and gave me a new direction for my project. I started to focus more on money because from the results of the survey few people answered that some choices depends of how much money you have.

From that point I planned to do a ‘Context Mapping session’ with users. I ask them to come together so we could do a little research experiment.

Context Mapping

This session helps me to gained deeper insights of the user with their behavior and thoughts of the way they spend their money.

[Respondents where making collages about their spending behavior. After they made a collage the next step was to present to each other what they had made]

SPENDER
After I did enough research I started to create concepts on basis of the insights. I formulating a problem that was focus on the spending behavior of students. “These days students don’t know how much money they spend because by the use of their debit card”

As a solution a created SPENDER, a smart service that helps students and people who have difficulty with their spendings be in control of their spending behavior.

Prototyping and testing
To feel and interact with the product I made a low fidelity prototype also known als ‘paper prototype’. To see how people interact with the service SPENDER. I record it (in dutch) to use as reference book.

Final Exhibition
Our end event was the minor Exhibition where every student has to present their concept, prototypes and final deliverables. It was the “big” day to show your end results to everyone who was visiting our exhibition. First we gave a short pitch to the rest of our class and teachers who where involved in this minor and after that everyone was free to visit our stands. There were a lot of people interested what made it really nice to talk about your project and what I’ve done in this months. This exhibition made it possible to see every part of your project come together.

[ See how I experienced this Minor]

Today I did a context mapping session in my home with a few students. I wanted to know more about students and money. What sort of choices do they make when they have less money. And how do they spend their money.

The students have to create collages about two questions about their behavior in combination with money. It was a very interesting session. I will tell you later the results of this session but first I will give you an impression about this evening.