Casey's Insights on Innovation

Hi everyone! My name is Casey Herrmann and I’m a senior from Richmond, VA. I’m a Marketing (just switched from Finance) and Government double major. The topics of government and policy have always intrigued me – I love subjects that are fueled by passion, opinions, and even some discomfort. My dad and I have gotten […]

Going into the last week, I thought the “Define” process would be a walk in the park. We had done all the grunt work and had loads of rich data in front of us – what could go wrong? Well, at first, nothing did. Though I unfortunately had to miss class the day we created […]

After creating a solid prototype of our product, the R&R box, it was time to get feedback on all of our hard work. I thought it was incredibly useful to do a practice focus group in class. Since I was the moderator, I felt a lot more comfortable after running through the script once and […]

The ideation process proved to be one of my favorite steps of the design thinking process thus far. Coming into class on Tuesday, I was certain that this step would stress me out – years of traditional schooling has definitely stifled my creativity a little bit and fear of the unknown is a huge driving […]

Background: I conducted two in-depth interviews in the hopes of gaining valuable insights about graduate students in cities and their housing choices. My first subject, Anna, is a 22-year-old graduate student at Harvard University, pursuing her Master’s of Science in Quantitative Genetics. My second subject, Caitlin, is a 25-year-old law student at Penn State. The […]

Before this project, I never had any experience just sitting down and observing someone. I went into this process expecting my hour of observation to be totally uncomfortable, but after doing it, I definitely have a new appreciation for the art of observation. Overall, I think both the successes and obstacles of my observation experience […]

After getting frustrated with the empathy map process, I was excited to move to a different step and try to dig a little bit deeper into our insights. Overall, I thought the process of creating the problem statements was incredibly useful and there are a few lessons I learned along the way: Trust your instincts. When […]

After solidifying our idea during the ideation phase, my team was confident to move on to prototyping and see our vision actually come to life! One of the first decisions we had to make was what type of prototype to create. Though our immediate idea for our graduate staycation subscription box was to create a […]

Before our bootcamp, I had only been exposed to design thinking once before. During my 10-week internship this past summer at Cognosante, all of the interns had the opportunity to complete a side project in the company’s design thinking lab. I was captivated by the process then, and this time was no different. Background: I […]

I genuinely can’t believe that this course has ended – it seems like just yesterday that I was stepping into the design studio for the first time, completely unaware of what to expect. Now, as I sit down to reflect on the entire semester, I’m realizing how many amazing lessons I’ve learned throughout this class. […]