Our team has focused on developing a service that trains immigrants in general construction skills through a weekend education program. Our hopes are that this will provide immigrants with usable skills allowing them access to a new employment sector, and also give them a means to being successfully integrated into their new communities and establish a sense of ownership in the neighborhoods where they live, work and train.
However, while our team has been focusing directly on the challenge of integrating immigrants into new communities, I feel our group has worked indirectly to integrate me into the “design thinking” world. My teammates have been very supportive and informative, (especially when I ask questions like, “What is that?” or “Why are we doing it this way?”), and I am learning a lot just from following in their lead in our project management and design thinking. I hope to learn more about policy research and evaluation in the coming weeks from my other group members!
Interestingly, I have found a lot of similarities between approaches to design, idea generation and project management between design and engineering, and it seems both groups have very similar end goals as well- to innovate a solution using their expertise that solves a problem for their client. But the vocabulary and lens of examination differs. For example, I have found the phasing concept of “exploratory, generative and evaluative” to be very useful in structuring our team research process, and bears striking similarities to a concept I am more familiar with, stage-gating. Both of these systems break projects down into task modules and a combination of benchmarks and checkpoints to help gauge progress and likely hood for success. However, within stage-gating, typically the technology and innovation itself drives progress, monitored and facilitated by the engineering and marketing departments in tandem. However the “EGE” process I’ve learned in this course focuses much more on external feedback, namely from users and stakeholders, throughout all levels and stages of the development process.
I think stage-gating could benefit a lot from bringing in stakeholder evaluations at each gate, which are usually not brought in until the last phases of commercialization. Typically this is because the innovation or solution at hand involves some degree of technical uncertainty and the technology has to brought to full fruition before applications and real value can begin to be crafted out of it. However, I would imagine this would be a useful feedback loop to have even in these early stages of R&D as it would tell technologists what technologies to focus on and which technologies potentially are a waste of time or are not desired by consumers. Moreover, some consumers or stakeholders who are more technically educated or analytically minded may be able to provide valuable insight into capabilities, applications and new avenues for development that may lead to greater value generation later on.
Design and Policy 