Sydney Brown

1/8/15
Period 3

Activity 1.5 The Deep Dive

Introduction
How do professional design companies work through a design process? The video
you are about to see chronicles the efforts of a world-renowned design firm, as they
apply their process to the redesign of a common, everyday product.
One of the best-documented examples of the design process in action took place in
Palo Alto, California, at an industrial design firm called IDEO. ABC News gave IDEO
the challenge of redesigning the old and familiar shopping cart in just five days.
Nightline chronicled the experience and aired the program on February 9, 1999.
This short documentary reinforces the idea that fantastic solutions can be produced
under very difficult constraints when the designers have a commitment to the
problem, a firm understanding of a design process, and a willingness to operate as a
team.
In this activity you will watch the Deep Dive documentary and record information
related to the design process used in the redesign of a shopping cart.

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Equipment

Computer
The Deep Dive video(s)

Procedure
In this activity you will watch a group of professionals work to solve a design problem
in just five days. Answer the following questions as you watch The Deep Dive. A
class discussion will take place following the broadcast.
1. From the buildings in which we live and work, to the cars we drive, or the knives
and forks with which we eat, everything we use was designed to create some
sort of marriage between form and function.
2. The folks at IDEO state that they are not experts in any given area. But they do
claim to be experts on the process on how they design stuff, which they apply to
the innovation of consumer products.
3. After the team of designers is brought together, introduced to the problem, and
informed they have five days to pull it off, what phase of the design process do
they immediately engage in?

BRAINSTORMING
4. Give two examples of what the team members did during this phase.
a. Shared problems of the shopping cart
b. Went to a common grocery store to see what problems shoppers had with
shopping carts.
5. List five rules of thumb that IDEO employees follow when they share ideas during
the brainstorming phase:
a. Everyone participates in brainstorming
b. Everyone is aloud to be equal in his or her ideas, but there is always
someone always has to lead the group in the right direction.
c. Dont think that your idea is better than someone elses.
d. No one is too young or not experienced enough to share their ideas with
the group.
e. Have ways to back up your ideas with sketches and research.

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6. Why should wild (and sometimes crazy) ideas be entertained during the
brainstorming phase?
Ideas that can sometimes seem crazy to others can sometimes be the most wise
and successful. No ones should ever seem crazy because everyone can
sometimes think that others ideas other than their own are crazy in my opinion.
7. After the brainstorming phase was over, the team narrowed down the hundreds
of ideas by voting for those ideas that were not only cool but also buildable in a
short period of time. Which phase of the design process includes brainstorming
and narrowing ideas? Developing a solution includes brainstorming and
narrowing ideas. This is true because when you develop a solution you are not
only coming up with more ideas, but also narrowing ideas at the same time.
8. IDEO believes that the ideas and efforts of a team will always be more
successful than the planning of a lone genius.
9. Once the ideas were narrowed down and divided into categories, the group was
split into four smaller teams. For which phase(s) of the design process was each
of these groups responsible? Shopping, check out, safety, and finding what you
are looking for.
10. The leaders at IDEO believe that playful behavior and a social environment are
two important reasons why their employees are able to think quickly and
creatively to produce innovative results.
11. Sometimes, people come up with great solutions that work by trying their ideas
first and asking for forgiveness later.
12. Design is often a process of going too far and having to take a few steps back.
What phase(s) of the design process would the critique of the four mock-ups
come under? It would fall under the design process of Evaluation Solution. I say
this because they are evaluating/ critiquing what the other designers did that
though would be a solution to the overall design problem. This is why Evaluating
Solution works so well.
13. Upon critique of the four teams models, it was obvious that none of the teams
had developed an optimum solution. However, the people at IDEO believe that it
is important to fail often in order to succeed sooner.
14. What percentage of the entire weeks time did it take to fabricate the final
prototype? 1 day= 1/5= 20%

15. Instead of showering his design team with a tremendous amount of praise, what
did the boss require his employees to do with their new design?
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Take the design to a super market because it does not matter what they think
about the design it is what the people think that are going to use the design.

16. Of all the things that we are surrounded by every day, what has not been placed
through the design process?

NATURE
Extend Your Understanding (Optional)
Engineers need to know what problems they are addressing. They must have an
idea about the degree to which the solution should be carried out, along with what
the solution should do to solve the problem. The engineer must also work within
constraints, such as time and budget. A design brief is a tool that is used to concisely
identify the problem, solution expectations, and project constraints. The engineer will
often return to the design brief throughout a design process to assess the progress
and validity of his or her creative work.
Imagine that you are part of that design team. The project leader has given you the
responsibility of creating a design brief that defines the problem, states the
expectations that the solution must meet, and identifies the project criteria and
constraints. Your design brief will serve as a guide to the team as they work through
the design process.
From your observations of the video, record your information in the design brief on
the following page or in your engineering notebook.
I did not do this section because I had other work to finish and this section was
optional.

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Shopping Cart Redesign Design Brief

Client:
Who is the customer or client that is
paying for the design service?

End User:
Who is going to use the new
product?

Designer(s):
Who was responsible for the design
of the revised grocery cart?

Problem Statement:
What was the problem that the
design team was trying to solve?
Write your answer as a complete
sentence.

Design Statement:
To what degree was the solution to
be realized? Was the design teams
intention to merely sketch an idea
and be done? Was the intention to
come up with an idea, build it, and
stop there? Or, was it the design
teams intention to design, build, and
test an idea? What expectation(s)
did the design have to meet before it
would be considered a successful
solution to the problem? In other
words, what did the solution have to
do?

_______________________________________________

Criteria and Constraints:

What criteria did the solution have to
meet? What limitations did the
design team have to work with? Was
there a time constraint to get the
project finished?

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Conclusion Questions
1 What was the most impressive part of the teams effort?
How all of the team was engaged in the conversation and how everyone had the
same motivation was the most impressive part of the teams effort.
17. What advantages are there to having a design team with members that have
non-engineering backgrounds?
The advantage to having a design team that does not have an engineering
background is because they all have lived differently therefore they all bring
different things to the table. For example if you had a person that was a biology
major and they were doing the shopping cart design challenge they could tell
how the human body operates and how the mind works to tell people to buy
certain products.
18. There was a point in the process where a self-appointed group of adults stepped
up, stopped the ideas, and redirected the group to break up into teams. Why was
this done?
The group had to break off in teams because at some point ideas have to stop
and designs especially when they have a deadline, someone has to get the ball
rolling. Therefore in every group some has to take charge but not be over
barring about it.
19. At the end of the video, Dave Kelly states, Look around. The only things that are
not designed are the things we find in nature. Can you think of anything that
would contradict this statement?
This statement is very true, but nature can be designed especially when
researching in the super market area. If my dates are correct Genetically
Modified Foods were introduced before that time period which meant that
scientist were designing naturally grown foods to do what they wanted to do such
as survive droughts or have a longer shelf life. In order for this process to take
place some designing in nature had to occur.
20.
Consider the various versions of a design process (below) that were
introduced in the Design Process presentation that you viewed. How are the
processes similar? How are they different?

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ITEA Standards for Technology Literacy

Design Process used in IED

These design processes are similar, because they all introduce a problem/ a need,
all have research involved, create solutions, design prototypes, require people to
come up with ideas, and lastly they all require criteria to be explained. These design
processes are different, because some do not have alternative solutions, do not
require you to have a design brief, and lastly some of the design processes do not
have you to present the solution.
21.
Do you think the tasks completed by the design team during the design
challenge or the final solutions would have changed if the team had followed a
different version of a design process? Explain.
Yes, I do believe that if the design process was different the outcome and solutions
would different. I say this because if you think about all the differences in eat
design process could maybe not change the solution as much, but it may change
the design tasks at hand.

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