Singapore American School: A super rich, super innovative, and super successful school. With all these key attributes that make it the amazing school that it is, what could possibly be wrong with it? This was the prompt we were given in our second unit for Quest, and with that, my team and I immediately decided on the fact that our school needs to change its impact on the Singaporean environment. Through aspects such as surveys, interviews, and studies, we were able to take a problem that we could identify at SAS through the design process of emphasizing, defining, ideating, prototyping, and finally, testing. Through this, we crafted our best, simple solution for one of the many problems surrounding our great school.

“How might we raise awareness of SAS’s environmental impact?” This was the essential question that we had to hastily fix with some sort of policy, invention, or activity. Although extremely daunting, we were able to take this problem and solve it piece by piece. Before all of this, identifying the problem was quite simple. Our team went around the school to interview about 10 individuals of all age groups and sections of the school in order to get an idea of the school's overall opinion on how SAS is doing in terms of sustainability, wastage, and conservation. From the general responses to questions, we found a trend of people simply being completely unaware of SAS’s environmental impact, whether it be us having solar panels, or how stick to using paper bowls because students are too lazy to bring plastic plates back down to the cafe. This input led us to start ideating for possible solutions to raise awareness. The two most notable designs were a farmers market at SAS, or Recyclaball: A fun, competitive way getting people to recycle through the use of a large recycling bin with basketball hoops a point system, and a bunch of other dodads which were quite frankly over the top.

    An interview with Prescott Gaylord, a member of the facilities office at SAS, was one of the factors that led us to go down the paper recycling path to solve our problem. After presenting both ideas, Gaylord fell in love with our crazy and over the top Recyclaball, as did we. This is where we ran into one of our first problems: turning this into a pet project. We ran back to the Quest room with haste; excited to show off our idea that had previously been mocked (with good reason) so we could flaunt our validation from a guy who handles the kind of problems we are trying to solve for a living. Our excitement quickly died down as soon as we sat down with Simon, who gave us a brutally honest opinion on what we were doing. A later comment on our Nuvu page from him confirmed that it “[seemed] like there was much excitement around "recyclaball" but that it was indeed giving you tunnel vision.”  We were only in the third stage of the design process, and we had already sent ourselves into the fifth, so this talk was vital to us moving onto our next phase.

    Prototyping was the section which we stepped into way too fast, but after our disheartening but necessary conclusion, we took a step back and took other ideas into consideration. After much deliberation and hard work, we actually came to current design by stripping down what we had with Recyclabox to a simple, large clear box. The idea that if we collected all the paper at SAS in a large, acrylic box for all of the high school to see came from a paper which derived from my own personal studies for the senior project. Sarah Darby’s study, The Effectiveness of Feedback on Energy Consumption, looked at the most effective ways of getting people to save energy in their households with feedback on their usage. One of the many studies placed a smart meter, which digitizes the information from meters that measure utility usage in households, into the living rooms of a few subjects within the test, opposed to normally having these meters outside. The study found that “Of 999 enquiries in 1996/97, 421 clients are recorded as having made savings: these ranged up to €1500 per year, although the bulk (279) fell between €75 and €450 (WLEAP 1997).” This study showed me that receiving direct feedback on how much we are using can truly impact how much we start to save.

Our prototyping began by simply laser cutting a small acrylic box, which we then filled with paper to represent a small scale version of what we wanted to create. Following this, we once again did a few rounds around the high school and collected information from over 50 students, teachers, and members of facilities. We simply asked “if this box was 12x12x12, and contained the same ratio of paper inside as this smaller model, would it change your view on paper usage at SAS?” Our collections showed that 75% of the surveyed population expressed that it would change their view, with the other 25% saying it wouldn’t because they already knew. Another piece of valuable information from the survey was the fact that most of the people who said it wouldn’t change their view were members of environmentally based clubs such as GIN or SAVE, or were students of an environmental science class. This data was proof that many are unaware of how much we are using, and that having a device like this in the high school will raise awareness of the environmental impact of SAS.

    With a small prototype in hand, and a bunch of supporting data to justify the creation of this box, we entered the final stage of the design process: testing. Testing only really began once we had a solid basis of what we needed: A waterproof, durable, and simple device that is easily viewable from most parts of the high school, along with a touchscreen interface which prompts the audience with “does this change your impact of paper usage at SAS?” Programming this was not as big as a challenge as we thought it was going to be, since we were all able to pull in parts of our previous tinkering projects in order to craft this one. Logistically, we went through many debates on the actual size and construction of the box. We didn’t really think about the scale until the day before our pitch, so a big issue that we had to work through was coming to a conclusion on the final size. The issue with this was that we couldn’t simply make a giant acrylic box of any parameter we wanted. This dawned on us after calling Dama, the schools acrylic supplier, who informed us that you can only get acrylic panes as big as 8x4 feet. Simon also pointed out that we were going to have a hard time making this last a month without breaking. This is why we decided to reinforce the acrylic with wood.

    Going through the design process with a team of people was one of the most informative lessons I’ve taken away from my education at SAS. Instead of being given a problem, we were told to go find one first. This threw many of us off track not only at the beginning of the project, but throughout the entire thing. It was hard to stay to constantly trace back to what we were truly trying to solve, because we didn’t really have a rubric or example that we could constantly fall back on to make sure we doing everything correctly. It was crushing to get excited about an idea, just to completely abandon it after analyzing it fully, and I think this is extremely important because it taught us that there is an infinite amount solutions to the problems we have in this world. Getting too invested in an idea and making it your pride and joy is never a good idea in situations like these. From all this, I believe that unit 2 has taught me to be open to any idea thrown at me. In order to be efficient, you have to be able to adapt and morph whatever idea you have in any way possible to get to your original goal that you set.

    The design process starts with empathy, but before that it starts with a theme. The theme is what type of problem we want to go find. For example my group knew we wanted to do something to help the environment, but we didn't know what the problem was going to be. That's where empathy came in. I went around asking people questions about what they know, or what they think are issues surrounding the environment and SAS. I feel this process didn't go as well as it could have because I only talked to eight people and I feel I could have done more. Also it felt really awkward when I was asking questions, next time I want to work on making it more like a discussion so I can really see what their needs are. 

    Defining the problem was a challenge for me and my group. We struggled because we saw so many issues arising from our empathy piece. We were able to boil it down to awareness as the big issue, so we created our original how might we to be How might we raise awareness about SAS' environmental efforts? We started moving on to other steps in the process, we soon realized that our statement was way to broad. We decided we would go back and redefine. We came up with, How might we raise awareness of paper usage at SAS? 

    The ideation part I didn't do originally because I was sick, but I was able to get cought up from my group. Next time I would like to actually take part in  the ideation process.  

     Prototyping at first was very confusing becuase I missed the ideation, but I was told to prototype a farmers market. That is what I did the next time we met we had all prototyped completely different ideas, farmers market, recyclaball, food waste, and a few others. The challenge with this was they all tackled different parts of our how might we, this is when we decided to change it. We then prototyped the recyclaball in many variations our final one used the actually recycling bin and we added a basket ball hoop on top. After this idea got shot down we had to go back to the drawing board for new ideas-so going back to ideation. After going for a walk to clear our heads we came up with many new ideas but decided to stick with the recyclabox. Our very first prototype was a cardboard box but that didn't allow us to actually understand our product. Our final prototype was the laser cut box so that when we went testing people could actually see the idea. 

     The testing phase was interesting to say the least. When we started testing recyclaball we were going around and not really collecting good data that would be actually useful because we were literally handing people a ball of paper and having them throw it in and said wasn't that fun. After this idea was pretty much shot down, we decided to do the recyclabox. We took our prototype around and asked people if it was bigger would it change your perspective of paper usage at SAS. In hindsight following that question we should have asked why, but we were so focused on getting quantative data. 

     This was not my first time going through this process because I took Design and Innovation in 9th grade, but I found it a lot harder this time then when I did it back then. I think it's because it was hard to get things done to move forward with the project since our gorup never seemed to really be on the same page at all. It was like some one was at the very beginning of a really long book someone was on the very last page and then everyone was spread out throughout the rest, sometimes we weren't even in the same book. This is good in the ideation phase but other than that we needed to be a little more together. I found that the process is really connected by communication if you don't have communication you can't get any where.

Our design thinking process began with finding a theme that we wanted to pursue. We knew that we wanted to find a way to help the environment so we decided that Empathy would be our theme, and we would direct it toward the environment.

The next step in the process was needfinding. Each of us went around the high school and asked five questions to several teachers and students that were centered around SAS's environmental impact. We found that the majority of students at SAS were uninformed of SAS recycling. Recycling is a very broad term so we decided that our ideation should be based around informing students of paper usage at SAS. 

The third step in the process was ideation. During ideation we came up with a project that we all wanted to pursue far too early, limiting our ability to have the best idea that we could possibly have because we all became focused on one way too early in the process of design thinking.

The next step was to prototype. We all went home with a different idea to prototype, and brought our prototypes to school on monday. We all decided that we would focus on our original idea. Our original idea was working well, but was very simple and had almost certainly been done before. On wednesday we decided to change our idea to a social experiment. When we changed the idea we had very little time to get our prototype running and have our tests done.

The final testing phase was very interesting as we got almost all positive, a few neutral, and zero negative results. In order to test, we drafted five thought provoking questions and went around the high school with our prototype. We asked the questions and then presented the prototype. All of the data we received was immediately put into a data table and then into a graph.

The design thinking process was very interesting and I would enjoy going through it again for sure. I would put emphasis on stating that the ideation step is possibly the most important. And it is a good idea to come up with a TON of ideas before even thinking about elimination some.