12. Parking sucks!
I love the
Farmer's
Market!
You can do
everything
here!
I almost got
run over!!
Yes, close down
the road!
No, don't close
down the road!
I love the
community!
Lots of
Feedback
Design Thinking! This is a concept that we learned from the Stanford d.school. It consists of five different aspects three of which I will cover and two which will be covered later on in the presentation. The three that I am going to go over are empathizing, defining, and ideating. The first step to this process is empathizing. We started off by meeting three representatives from the Omaha Smart Cities that were all from different organizations. They showed us the map of the Aksarben area and discussed their plans for the future. We were extremely excited and ready to get started helping them in any way possible. We asked countless questions to try and see what they were all about and what the goal of the organization was as most of us had never heard of it before. In addition they have bi-weekly meetings with the steering committee where all of the organizations come together and discuss their ideas. Unfortunately I was not able to attend any of these meetings but some of the people from our group were! They learned an abundance of information which helped us to the problem statement.
The next step in the design thinking process is define. Our problem statement is that Omaha is not pedestrian friendly. We are trying to help improve transportation and pedestrian traffic in the Aksarben area as a pilot program to transfer then to the rest of the city. This is a daunting task that relies on many different aspects each with their own committee. We saw how diligently that the committees worked to accomplish their tasks, leaving us in a little bit of a pickle because the next step in the process is ideating.
We had a few ideas in terms of ideating. At first we were going to help with the electric scooters that would be implemented. We thought that we could do the geofencing on where the scooters could go. Our next idea was to do the data analytics from many surveys that were taken throughout the past couple of months. And our final idea was to add smart technology to crosswalks to make it safer for pedestrians to occupy the Aksarben area. As mentioned before the committees worked fast so by the time we decided on a project to work on it was already done. This lead to a deeper look into empathizing with the nonprofit. We found an aspect that the company had not thought of yet. Talking to the goers of the Aksarben area and the businesses there. We wanted to get their opinions on what we could do to improve the area. This past Friday and Saturday we were able to survey 16 groups of people and a couple of businesses. This leads us to the prototype we developed.
