Process
Monday
The week started off with a lecture concerning the topics "Interdependence" and "symbiosis". An interesting topic which inspired us to look into it some more. We figured out there are 3 different types of interdependence, and they can be found in many different fields (biology, business, globalisation,...). http://smallbusiness.chron.com/three-types-interdependence-organizational-structure-1764.html
After this introduction class, the students of MADE all presented their business idea in 60 seconds to the Spanish & English MIDI groups. The purpose of this pitch is to bring all the students up to date on the different projects. After this was done, the MIDI students all got to choose which topic they wanted to work on for the Trendslab. We were joined by a great group of people from MIDI; Jean, Gabriel, Rosario, Javier and Anja.
When we all formed our groups, Felix and I got to know our group a little better. Later we immediately started working on defining our target audience with our new co-workers for the week. Very soon, we realised Felix and I were approaching the target audience in a wrong way. Instead of dividing them by their sport, like we always did before, we now divided them into three different groups that occur in every extreme sport we are aiming at; Expressionists, Escapists and leisurists. During this exercise, we realise that these last two are extremely similar so we decided to take them together and make 2 general persona empathy mindmaps. One about the Expressionist, and one about the escapist/leisurist.
Tuesday
The second day was all about our customers' behaviour. We had to go on the street and find our target audience to observe them, look for objects to define patterns, ask them questions to get new insights,...
For this fieldwork, we decided to go to Macba again since it is packed with skaters and Barceloneta was not an option for surfers since it was already dark. We defined a lot of different objects and signals, leading to nine different patterns.**
This gives us the following 9 patterns:
Wednesday
Normally we had a class this day to explore online communities and social networks with Maya Ninova to understand tribes and trends. Since the teacher for this subject was sick at that time we got a very interesting lecture on trends and trend identification from Juan Isaza. He revealed his four steps to identify trends and his sources to find out about trends. Briefly the four steps;
Research fields of Politics and Economics (Key events, politic agenda, 'world-in' from 'the economist',...)
Research popular technology and cultures (revision of innovation, Rollingstone, vogue, fast company, wired, time/Newsweek, Trend watching, Sparks&Honey, Mintel, Lsnglobal, ....)
Group the trends which were found so far in different themes (At this point 95% of the work has been done)
Additional info (digital media, examples, links, factor of impact in different industries,...)
On this day we also got to meet Nelson Pinheiro who was going to guide us for the next days since he has experience working with trends (holds a PhD concerning the subject). He made the different terms related to trends clear and explained to us what tribes are. Then we started defining the different trends that influence our target audience with the aid of the patterns we mapped out and the internet (different trend watching websites, blogs, ...).
Thursday
On this day, we started working on the future trends canvas and trend narratives were given. Also, the future users' canvas has been used on this day. This last one was not the biggest assignment but turned out to be very useful for ideation since it sparked several ideas to make the escapist potentially an extreme user instead of a normal user.
Later this day we got a brief online Lecture of Pedro Fernandez Gaspar about trendhunter.com. From Pedro, we got a lot of new sources to look for trends related to our project. At the end of the day we were able to define all the trends we discovered;
3 MEGATRENDS
4 MACROTRENDS
8 MICROTRENDS
Friday
On the last day, we used the idea cards to look for future opportunity scenarios and a symbiosis strategy for our project. We came up with 3 different ideas we decided to pitch in our final presentation. That final presentation had to be given at 19:00h and still needed to be prepared so we definitely knew what to do the last hours before the final presentations.
The three idea's we presented are the following ones;
** The pictures during the observation on Tuesday are visible underneath. Video's and audios were also made about related occurrences and interviews but couldn't be uploaded to the blog, that's why there are screenshots of the videos at the end.
https://livestream.com/elisavabcn/trendslab-interdependence
https://quik.gopro.com/v/FnFcn5FbMo/