Week 2. Our challenge was to carry out research and understand the needs of users in order to design footwear that would meet these needs and identify a gap in a niche market. The emphasis was on qualitative (what they like and don’t like) rather than quantitative (how many use and how many find it valuable) research and to ‘Get out of the Building’, meet users and gain first-hand thoughts, ideas and knowledge. This is consistent with our recent reading from The Lean Start-Up, Ries E., where we are introduced to the Japansese concept of ‘genchi gembutsu’ or ‘go and see for yourself’ in order that decisions can be based on deep first-hand knowledge of users of products. The process that we are doing in class seems to incorporate the first steps in the ‘Build-Measure-Learn Feedback Loop’ concept put forward by Ries (below) which simply states that ‘ a start-up is a catalyst that transforms ideas into products’ and that ‘the products a startup builds are really experiments’ . We learnt, we had ideas, we built a prototype – the next steps would have been to go back to our users and generate feedback and data to improve our prototype.
We understood that people buy footwear for a variety of reasons ; fashion, colour, durability, brand, price. What we also learnt from our research was that many people, especially those coming to the UK for the first time, buy their footwear to keep their feet warm. They want a shoe that looks good but feels good in all weathers. The next stage was to take an informed idea to the design stage by creating a prototype within a short time-scale and prepare a presentation pitch explaining the basis of our idea and show-case the prototype.
Out of this came the infamous TNL Heated – a prototype that could self-heat, was powered by battery and operated by user-friendly SMART technology, was made of sustainable materials and incorporated the renowned TNL branding.
For the first time, I became interested in shoes..! As a follow-up, I wanted to contrast the class-room experience to the real world and compare and understand current footwear innovations and what is happening in the market-place. A great blog,
Finding the Perfect Shoe For You: 12 Innovative Footwear Startups to Follow
……flat shoes that fold up to fit into a pocket-sized pouch, a company that allows its customers to design their shoes on-line, all-weather footwear that work in the snow, a sneaker that has inter-changeable uppers connected to the bottom by a zipper, a smartphone App that uses the camera phone to scan your foot creating a model that is saved to your profile and allows you get round the problem of not being able to try on shoes when you are buying on-line. Brilliant, but equally impressive was the fact that a number of these trends had been picked up by Macers in their class presentations.We must be doing something right.
* TNL stands for Tim, Nicolas and Luca (many thanks to my fellow collaborators)
DESIGN THINKING : MY LIGHTBULB MOMENTS 