IDEO



    IDEO is a design and innovative consulting company. They are not ordinary designer who relies on research only. There need to get the insight in order to know the real problem and how customers really feel toward the problem. They may need to pretend to be the real customers sometimes. By the way, interview does not help them as much as they want so in this case, observation helps them to clarify better.

      Our entrepreneurship activity is about food safety in China. Few years ago, the news of milk powder which was contaminated with melamine was mentioned all around the world and this case made many countries to be aware more on the safety of Chinese food. At this point, we would like to know how Chinese people think toward their own country of food safety. As a result, our group is assigned to investigate about the concern of food safety of Chinese people toward modern trade such as Carrefour and traditional market; wet market. IDEO people suggested the design process as below in order to guide our process.

       Moreover, IDEO doesn't have a formal office layout like most of companies are doing. They allow employees to set up their own work space and shift to diffirent location after each project. It allows everyone to come up with new idea and open to new things which standard office space can't provide.

       Furthermore, everyone don't have to work seriously all the time. There are space for relax and chatting among the members. We can say that they allow people to have more freedom. They don't believe that putting rules on people will provide them with the best of each individual. 

Design process


 
     At IDEO, we have a short learning session with the staffs there. It is about how IDEO design things. They share an idea what is their design process and how they work. It is valuable for us to know IDEO's design which are concluded of these 3 constructs; 

   1. Desirable - Who will gain benefit from it? Think about the value chain.
   2. Feasible - How easy you can make? Look at key activities/partners/resources
   3. Viable - How business will gain from the design? Think about Cost&Revenue


        After the lecture session from IDEO, they gave us the topic of food safety in China to get the idea how the design process being done. To know what Shanghai people really need for the food safety here, we have to put our feet into the customer shoes. So one of the best method is survey and observation. In the evening, we were assigned to do a fieldwork at Carrefour hyper-mart and a wet market in Zhongshan area to grasp some insights about food safety. 

     Before we go to the fieldwork, we have a small discussion and brainstorming about what we are going to do there. We started to write down on the post it about the thing we want to know and some question we have about the food safety. After a while, we need to go to the fieldwork because the time was around 6pm.      
      
      The next day after we went to Carrefour and the wet market. We gather at IDEO again. This time we did a brainstorm again to find the stories behind what we have done yesterday. We found out many interesting idea and come up with the HMWs (How might we?).



     By the way, we were assigned to find the insight problem from customers from both kind of markets and present them to our friends. However, due to IDEO's style of working, we wouldn't be telling facts and numbers but we have to share our experience in the form of story.