Workday #1 - An overwhelming experience

After an interesting kick-off day with a practical case, the guest’s sharing and lots of brainstorming, we were all curious about the activities and the tasks that we will be assigned to do during the first work day. The first great news to our group in the session was the presence of a new member – the only man in the group. With varied original nationalities, personalities and having both male and female members, we believe that we will get a greater number of ideas and more comprehensive understanding about different issues raised in the course and therefore reach a better outcome.

<http://www.aikavaellus.fi/naehtaevyydet-reitin-varrella/kaarina>

The task that we had was to think how to create a phenomenon out of Timetrek, a hiking path between Kaarina and Turku. Unfortunately there wasn’t anyone from Timetrek’s staff to enlighten us about the company and the needs and hopes they had for us. It would have been interesting to hear their thoughts but on the other hand it was also good to start from the bottom without any presumptions. Our group had prepared three different kinds of service design tools for the class and applied two of them in the Timetrek-task.

Osborns' checklist 

We started with the SCAMPER-tool, also known as Osborn's checklist. It is an interesting tool and works especially well for altering and developing already existing ideas and products. As our coach Joachim mentioned; when something is too complex for our brain, it starts to search for a clearer focus and tries to divide the problem into more concrete pieces and that is exactly what happened in the beginning of the working day when we used the scramper-tool. We started with developing Timetrek in order to make it more appealing to customers, tried to think in the perspective of a customer and questioned ourselves: "What would attract me to join the Time Trek path? What makes me want to recommend my friends to go? “.Also, we quickly explained the reasons behind some current phenomenons which have widely spread through social media and linked to the case of Timetrek to see if there are any relevant solutions could be used. Then, we ended up with several good ideas. For examples, we suggested to add drama and actors to the different stages of the Timetrek path, work with guided tours, provide games for children, provide photography service and so on. The core value behind all of our ideas was to combine fun, education and physical activities in order to boost Timetrek to become a phenomenon.

How - how diagram

In the second part of the session, another group joined us to work on the same issue of Timetrek. As we two group used different design tools to do the brainstorming at the beginning, we had to spend some time to figure out how to combine all of our ideas into a common piece of work and which new design tool we should use to reflect our ideas. We got a quick instruction on how to use the tool “How- how” from the other group and we together tried to apply this process to the case. It sounded much easier than it really works. We struggled a little bit in developing the statements when some of them seem to be overlapped or too specific. The time limit didn’t allow us to develop the diagram futher than dividing our main ideas into four groups: the ones that had to do with learning, fun, uniting people and uniqueness of the product. 

Affinity diagram

Another tool that we chose to apply was Affinity diagram because the tool might help us exploit the advantage of having more people. In specific, the tool allows us to gather as many ideas as possible. Also, really new and innovative thoughts are also collected because we can freely write down our ideas without being influenced by others’ thoughts. Besides, in our specific case, the tool really helps one of our members who missed the beginning part of the session to catch up with the flow as we shared the ideas regardless of what had been already stated. After sorting the ideas into Education, Improvement, Fun, Business and Communication, we saw that there is one thing runs across all the idea groups that might promote Timetrek to become a phenomenon: "Leaving a legacy”. It means one could for example show in a picture how they will make a change and leave a personal print in the timeline of the universe.

Two groups combination 

It was a great experience to go through different kind of tools for the same case and compare the different results we had. However, we felt a little bit disappointed that we had to leave the work half-baked when we couldn’t manage the time to come up with any holistic conclusion for the case. Also, we couldn’t share our thoughts with someone from Timetrek as well as receiving the direct feedback from him or her.

After the session, we had a nice time together having lunch and talking about our interests, strengths and weaknesses. This comfortable conversation was really helpful for us to understand how each of us prefers to contribute and how we should organize our work later on.