The school and technology unit was filled with enjoyable experiences, but also was littered with failures and hardship. To say that the project was a wild ride would be an understatement. At first, we started with a group of five students – Glen, Lily, Bryce, Ciana, and I.

The first action we did as a group was to go out and interview people, trying to find and understand a problem that was plaguing SAS. I had somewhat mixed opinions about this part of the design process. One on hand, I enjoyed talking to people and hearing them tell stories about their experiences in SAS. On the other hand, I find it incredibly difficult to go up to someone I don’t know, and ask them for an interview. However, throughout the design process, I began to get more comfortable starting random conversations with strangers, in the attempt to garner some knowledge of the problem.

Eventually, we found a common problem in SAS – stress. This then led us to the need finding stage, where we used a method taught to us by Lily called the “fishbone method.” In this method we started with the major problems, and tried to narrow them down to a root cause. Eventually we found a few root causes of stress at SAS – the environment, the workload, and the lack of communication between the student body and the teachers. From this, we derived our how might we statement. “How might we mitigate stress at SAS.”

After we found our problem statement, we started throwing ideas out on how to solve it. This by far was my most enjoyable part of the project. During this time, we all sat in the conference room and just bounced idea after idea off one another. Eventually filling all the walls with post-its of various ideas. At this point, we came at an impasse – our group was split into two different groups, one which wanted to tackle the communication issue, and another which wanted to find a way to mitigate the stress levels of SAS.This is where Glenn and I split into our own small group.

We then began the ideating stage, asking students what they thought his root cause of their stress was? If it was easy to fix? How do they currently deal with stress? We also asked them to tell us a story about stress, whether it was them dealing with stress, or getting stressed out. Eventually, we found that the pressure from both students and parents contributed greatly to the stress. As well as this, the environment at SAS was one of unhealthy competition, which led to students measuring their worth, based on how they are ranked compared to all the other 1,200 high schoolers.

Unfortunately, we wouldn’t be able to fix this issue without making massive, long-term changes in both the culture and structure of SAS, so Glenn and I decided to find a way to decrease or make the stress more manageable. Eventually, we decided on a student lounge type area, a place where students could just go and relieve stress – a de-stress room.

Through both research, and personal anecdotes, we found that such places already exist in established institutions, such as universities (UC schools), schools (Top U.S High Schools and West Island School), and even workplaces (google). Afterwards, we then began to work on various designs of the room, first as a drawing on paper, then a 3d model made of cardboard. Throughout the designing process, we went out and asked random students what they thought of the designs, if they would change or add anything, would it help them relieve stress, and to walk us through a session in their ideal de-stress room. After every feedback session, we made small adjustments to our design, up until the 3d model. The 3d model was the culmination of all the feedback sessions, and was mainly used to gain a sense of how much this would be needed. This part was both fun, and somewhat infuriating. As I said before, the conversations and stories were incredibly fun to participate in. However, the initial reactions of people when we explained what we were doing were somewhat annoying. A large majority of them didn’t take it seriously at the start, which ended up giving us a large amount of unrealistic suggestions.

After we had a finalized model, we decided that we needed to prototype. We chose small section of the room to test. We decided to transform the conference room in the QUEST room to a small de-stress room.  We invited people to test it out, and recorded some very useful data. This was an enjoyable part of the process simply because we got to see how our room affected students, and it made us feel like we were really making a difference.

Afterwards, we analyzed the data and started to work on our business plan. Seeing as we were in a group of two, meeting up was incredibly easy. Glenn and I not only worked efficiently together, but we also enjoyed working with one another. I feel that this project demonstrated how group work and collaboration can bring people together (I know how clichéd this sounds).

In my opinion, this project was a great way to start the year. I was able to feel like what we were doing was making a difference, as well as learning some very valuable lessons. Unfortunately, the project ended on a somewhat sour note, with our Shark Tank presentation falling short, seeing as we somewhat misunderstood the purpose of the pitch. We had all the information we needed in our business plan we needed, but failed to bring it up in the pitch.

Overall, an enjoyable and worthwhile experience.