How might we understand the relationship between designers and engineers in a company and help enhance the company culture?
Project Duration - 10 Weeks
Team - 4 Members
Focus - Research Methods
Final Deliverable - Insights
Secondary Research
We started our project by finding out various facts and figures related to our project using different secondary research methods such as popular media scan and Key facts. We referred to various online articles, Scholarly articles, books, TEDx talks etc. and came up many insights and highlighted some of them below.
Business Objective
Through Secondory research we got a basic understating of the relationship problems within engineers and designers in any firm. Before we start with our project, we defined a set of objectives we would want to achieve through this project.
Primary Research
We have used three main methods for collecting data through primary research, Interviews, Cultural Probes and Surveys.
Affintizing
After completing our interviews, observations and cultural probes we began affinitizing the data. To do this we transcribed every data point we collected onto yellow sticky notes which we would analyze and group to find common connections and insights.
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The first step was to randomize the sticky notes we had transcribed and begin to rapidly group together those we found to be related.
In next round we grouped the blue notes together in the same fashion however, no group could have more than eight blue notes.
Categories
Our final phase of affinitizing required us to group the second round stickies into groups which we labeled with green sticky notes. what we ended with, would be the ultimate insights we gleaned from our initial weeks of research.
Flow Chart
We used flow diagram as a tool to brainstorm the three core factors affecting the relationship between the designers and engineers according to our research and the categories. Through our flow diagram we came up with three core factors finding relations in the categories and highlighted the opportunity areas.
Process and Relationship Map
Once we outlined our three prime factors to focus upon , the next step was to list down our stake holders. We prepared the relationship map to understand the same. We summarized the work flow and stakeholders together in the process map and also found the relationship between different stakeholders to define their power and influence.
Descriptive Value Web
Persona
We used archetypes to think about the relationships of engineers and designers and scenarios in the workplace.
Re-framing of Persona
we re-framed our thoughts to imagine the situations from other people’s perspective. For example, if we thought about a situation from a designer’s perspective, we then thought about the same situation from the project manager’s perspective and experiences.
Opportunities
Using our affinity mapping as a reference, we began to try to understand our information as opportunities. Were there any gaps in our data, were there any obvious needs, requirements, pain-points, or frustrations? We used these bits of information to inform our strategy going forward.
How Might we....
Possible Solutions
Keeping the how might we question as our opportunities, Our next step was to come up with as many solutions as we can and with the segregations into three main categories we analyzed our solution under passionate, Feasible and Long-term and finalized the most relevant to our project.
Finalizing Solutions
With the help of persona reframing and looking at the how might we question few solutions were finalized. By analyzing the solution with main three aspects that are feasible, long-term, passionate we came up with three main areas to focus inside the office for the betterment of relationship between engineers and designers.
Developing Final solutions
After synthesizing the solutions with the help of the previous steps, we developed the final solutions in all the three main areas we focused on- workplace Culture, workplace settings, and workspace.
