This week, I attended Tribe Innovation’s final sprint of the semester. The sprint session was focused on increasing sustainability in academics and research at W&M and I was on a team with two classmates and my close friend who came with me.
My friend and I!
The overall experience reminded me a lot of our cell phone bootcamp from the first week of class. But after utilizing the design thinking process in depth this semester, it was a little weird to just complete a small segment of the process. However, due to the time constraints of the session, I think brainstorming and prototyping made the most sense to focus on. Since I’ve been with the same team all semester, it was really interesting to brainstorm alongside fresh faces. My team ended up coming up with 44 ideas related to sustainability. In order to organize our ideas, the facilitators had us write headlines on our board and then group ideas into the headlines. This was a different method than what we’ve used in class, but I thought it worked out really well! After completing this step, we realized that a lot of our ideas related to sustainability broadly, but not specifically on academics and/or research. So, this step was really helpful to narrow down our ideas and separate the “cool” ideas from the ones that actually solved the issue.
In the end, the concept we chose was a combination of two ideas – a base idea my friend had thought of and one I thought of that built off of her original idea. We proposed that computer science and data science students would take a 3-credit course entitled “Sustainability Website Design”. In this course, students would collect data and design a website that monitors real-time campus energy use. Once the website is created, it could then be used in existing courses (environmental science, business analytics, etc.) to record, monitor, and analyze data. For our quick prototype, we created a storyboard and a sample page of potential data that could appear on the website.
I was really pleased with our concept and a little surprised that we were able to think of it in such a short amount of time! The sprint session definitely reminded me of the importance of teamwork and taking an unbiased approach to any problem.