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Good Seed is a social innovation training and funding programme developed and organised by The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Spanning four months from research to the showcase of product, this programme aims to nurture and empower social innovators to solve real world problems for the benefits of the vulnerable and the underprivileged communities through organising social entrepreneurship and design thinking workshops, consultancy chat with professionals and several empathy activities.
To better understand and apply design thinking concepts in real-life scenarios, I joined the second cohort of the programme in 2022 and participated in some activities and workshops to engage with users and brainstorm ideas to solve social problems. This ideation workshop is one of the events that I find extremely fruitful, practical and hence worth sharing.
Before stepping into the ideation phase, we joined several empathy activities on a voluntary basis to engage with stakeholders or users with different needs such as startup founders in the mental health stream, teachers at SEN schools and the hearing impaired. Through participating in the sharing sessions and interactive activities hosted by them, we can better understand their needs and collect primary data for further ideation.
We formed a team of 9 to walk through the ideation process together in this 3-hour workshop. As the majority of the teammates joined an empathy activity about visiting the low-income families living in sub-divided flats, we decided to develop our idea on this topic.
In order to consolidate our observations and research, we created an empathy map to illustrate users’ behaviour based on what they say, see, do, think and feel.
Throughout the process, we identified several pain points. The biggest challenge we faced in this stage is the insufficient amount of findings we could work on as only a few of us interacted with the users in advance, which therefore limited the perspectives we could focus on for the next steps.