Archive for the ‘History’ Category

3brick what?

Monday, April 20th, 2009

three-brick

Coming up with a name is hard.  Really, really hard.  Especially in a world where URLs are so important but domain squatters have seemingly grabbed everything out there.

Over the course of a week, we spent over 10 hours brainstorming together working through concepts for our name.  We were coming up with a bunch of OK ideas, but nothing was feeling right.  And then, during the ride home from one such session, it just hit Jackie and Larissa: it’s all about the 3 brick stove.  The rest seemed quite obvious to the three of us:

About 3 billion people still cook on an open flame–often with their pots resting on three bricks or stones.  When we first saw these stoves, we immediately assumed it would be easy to create a better design because they are unsafe and very inefficient at transferring heat.  However their durability, ease of use, and minimal up-front cost make them tough competition.

Our team’s name is about having respect, understanding culture, and designing the best solution for our customers.  There’s a reason why these three-brick stoves have been around for thousands of years.  They are not perfect, but we have more to learn from them than most people might think.

We picked the name about a month ago.  I think we all are still quite pleased about the decision.  :-)

Tags: , , ,
Posted in History | 1 Comment »

Developing our customer point of view

Sunday, April 19th, 2009
our customer
One of the first steps in designing a meaningful product is really knowing who you’re designing for.  Our trip to Myanmar enabled us get in touch with our user–to talk with rural families, to gain insight about their cooking habits, and to understand what’s important to them (and what’s not).  We gathered an incredible amount of information–notes, pictures, videos, stories, and memories–but when we got home, it was easy to feel lost in all of it.  We immediately thought to ourselves:     

How do we organize all of this stuff?

How do we make sense of it all?

How do we create a coherent story?

“Get it out and get it visual” was our mantra.  We put everything on post-its and up on a whiteboard–a process we like to call “space saturation” at the d.school.  Going through this process helped us revisit our material and create a visual environment where we could immerse ourselves in our findings.  From there, we grouped information into categories like “safety,” “deforestation,” “transportation,” and “prices,” sometimes creating duplicates for facts, observations, and thoughts that fit into multiple categories.  After a few hours, we were ready to start characterizing our user.  Specifically, we were instructed to develop a customer point of view, a concise statement that describes our user, the need, and the insight supporting that need.  After lots of revisions, we came up with this:

A risk-averse, rural woman living on less than $2 a day needs a safer and more fuel-efficient method of cooking to combat the rising cost and shortage of firewood.

A concise point of view has been a great way for us to keep our design (and us) focused on the person that really matters.  It has also served as a basis for brainstorming potential solutions (i.e. “how can we make our stove safer?”) and for evaluating our competing ideas.  Finally, it has helped us communicate why what we’re doing is so important–to rally people around the user we’re designing for and the need we’re working to address.

In a future blog post (What our user cares about), we’ll share the thinking that went into its creation.

Tags: ,
Posted in History, Our Design Philosophy | 1 Comment »