Red Dot 2006

This was an effort that the Creative group (and later some other ZJU competition teams) put towards the 2006 Red Dot Concept Award competition. This competition is open so we spent a lot of time looking for a good approach.

My role on this project was as an innovation team member. During the course of the project I did a few specific things for the team including a few "Getting Out of the Box" sessions and another "Looking for Need" workshop. Details on these are below:

1. "Getting Out of the Box" sessions: These were a number of occasions designed to press some of the importance of leaving the lab and seeing more of the world to get more informed design outcomes. We walked around some areas of Hangzhou for quite some time, documenting human behavior and looking for weak signals and discussing design needs that we were seeing or experiencing.
2. "Looking for Need" workshop: This was a workshop where we discussed finding the need behind a design and finding a need before creating design. The goal was to start to introduce some of areas of interest for our Red Dot submission to find some problems that were not too big to tackle.
   

I was not part of the finishing team because by the due date of this project the Creative Group had dissolved and I had been moved into Lab 318. I was then busy with other projects and a new team was created to finish up the Red Dot submissions.

I was only really involved in this project for a few weeks but during that time I became a lot more confident that I had something valuable to offer others and I became a lot more able to speak publicly and without prompts. I think I also learnt about managing group projects and working towards a team ideal a little better. These things mentioned, I think I learnt more by watching the other student's approch to the project than by my own experience. They worked so much harder and did so much more contextualizing research than any other group of designers or design students I had ever worked with. I got the impression that they were really interested in their work and they they were really interested in winning. I found out later that this paid off.