At the start of this term, Ravensbourne Year One Product Design students were challenged to three design sprints aimed at demonstrating what can be achieved in a short period of time with a little hard work and lots of focus.
Students worked in teams to produce solutions to three challenges specific to Ravensbourne: heating food, recycling and cutting a large diameter hole in sheet material. They set five clear objectives that needed to be met by their designs, before generating ideas to address the problem. The top five were then developed into card models and evaluated by five real users at the university. In this way, students were able to see first hand how users responded to their ideas and, most importantly, how closely they had understood and addressed the original issue.
At Ravensbourne, we instil in our students a belief that hard work gets results. This experience also proved that working with users from the very beginning of a design project is the best guarantee of success.
