Class 9: IWG and The design thinking process.

Human centred design has informed much of our decision making process for Assessment 3. Human centred design is the idea of maintaining the desires of your target audience at the core of the project throughout the stages of inspiration, ideation and implementation. (Ideo.org 2019)

For our project, some target audiences were easier to be informed by than others. Our project targets both instagram influencers and the average user on instagram who either directly or indirectly consumes their content. The second target audience is large and easily accessible as ourselves, friends and class peers form this group. Which is why receiving positive feedback from our WIP presentations was a very encouraging sign that our project was appealing to the desires of at least one of our target groups. Insights into this group have also been informed by surveys which were distributed online and gave us valuable data regarding their desires during our initial inspiration phase.

Unfortunately reaching our primary target audience is more difficult due to their prominence and our insights into influencer behaviour were generated through secondary research rather than creating primary datasets through engaging with influencers. This is something which would be a big priority if designing our project in a real world scenario.

Regular feedback has been important to us and it was important for our group to always keep in mind the need for flexibility to adapt to feedback. It is difficult, but sometimes potential ideas which had a lot of support within the group needed to be abandoned or modified if we couldn't justify their existence in accordance with our target demographics interests. This is something which I wanted to keep in mind when giving feedback for other groups too. It can be an ego check but going back to the drawing board on some ideas is crucial to correctly performing the prototype stage of design (Simon 1969).

Going forward, we have one last chance to gain feedback before finalising our report and "implementing" our communication plan. The presentation on tuesday aims to be our most refined and clear demonstration of our plan yet. We shall be presenting our final prototypes and if all goes well our target audience will have a positive response, if they don't we have a chance to rectify this before thursdays deadline.

-T

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ideo.org 2019, What is human centered design?. Vimeo, Ideo.org Viewed Dec 15 2019. https://vimeo.com/106505300

Simon, Herbert 1969, Seven Stages of Design Thinking / Project Work . The Sciences of the Artificial. Cambridge: MIT Press. Viewed Dec 15 2019.

Our Target Audience is even in the name.