Creativity for Innovation and Design Thinking
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EIBS7300 Creativity for Innovation and Design Thinking
Assessment 1: Portfolio of Users and Their Features
Type: Individual Assignment; report
Length: Max. 6 pages for the body part (excluding title page, reference list, and appendices)
Weighting: 40% of final course mark
Due Date and Submission: Friday 31st March 2023, 2.00 pm uploaded via Turnitin (see Blackboard
folder)
Scenarios/Industries: 7 options, presented by Liquid Interactive during the lecture in Week 1 (see
list below).
Background:
In this assignment, you will select one of the 7 scenarios/industries presented by Liquid Interactive in
week 1 and conduct an analysis, aimed at identifying and describing a portfolio of users and their
features in such scenario.
Each scenario illustrates current trends experienced in a business/social context, with particular
reference to a specific industry. As a designer, you will need to identify end-users who are experiencing
challenges, or for which there are opportunities, worth addressing in that same scenario. Following a
design-led approach, you will need to ‘put yourself’ in the shoes of the identified end-users, to collect
as much as information as possible about them and build empathy with them. This will allow you to
truly understand what their ‘pains’ and ‘gains’ are. This will be the first, fundamental step for you to
find ways to alleviate those pains and magnify those gains, i.e., designing innovative products/services
for the benefit of your end-users.
Keep in mind, though: Assessment 1 does not require you to ideate products/services. You will do just
that in Assessment 2. In Assessment 1, you will stop at the ‘data gathering about users’ needs’ stage.
What you will need to do:
In your work, you will need to provide a critical, synthetic overview of the scenario and its associated
industry, identify at least 3 categories of users that you consider relevant to that scenario/industry and,
using the DT tools and techniques learnt in EIBS7300, unpack the most important features of those
categories of users: Pains and gains, ‘ups’, ‘downs’, needs, problems, opportunities, personal attitudes,
pain-points, feelings, ‘jobs to be done’, etc.
It is essential for you to utilise primary and secondary information sources to build an understanding
of, and ultimately empathy with, your identified end-users. Primary information sources include
qualitative (e.g., go and interview end-users), quantitative (e.g., run a survey to extract descriptive
statistics of a phenomenon) or a quali-quantitative data collection methods (e.g., run an online
questionnaire and register respondents’ answers). Secondary information sources include academic
(e.g., research papers on the industry/scenario and/or the end-users) and grey literature (e.g., consulting
reports on the same aspects), statistics websites, online fora, information publicly available on social
media, etc., etc.
There are no requirements in terms of how much primary and/or secondary information you create or
utilise. Keep in mind, however, that a good designer always interacts directly with their end-users;
purely relying on secondary information sources can greatly jeopardize a designer’s ability to build
empathy.
Finally, you will select, among the 3 categories of users you analysed and built empathy with, the most
relevant one, that is to say, the one category of users that should be addressed as a priority through a
design-led approach aimed at creating new services or products/improving existing services or products,
for them. It might be useful to think of that category of users as the final customers of the product/service
you will ultimately build for them.