Our 20 fearless iFellows made their way to the heart of creativity in Bangkok: the Bangkok University Creativity Center, to do prototyping in a suitable location. Talk about inspirational spaces! The campus is beautiful, and our team spent the day in a bright green, unique room. It was the perfect space to do testing, prototyping, and perfecting of project ideas.
We interviewed one of the iFellows, Gerard Moya Anton, about his experience:
Innovation: Explain the prototyping process that your team went through. What were the easiest parts, and what were the hardest?
Gerard: Our idea is to create a self-reporting tool for refugees to report incidents.
Our prototype has three components: a physical prototype of the system and a technical prototype of our app/website component. The physical prototype is crucial – through it we can map our whole process and test how each part interacts with the others. The technical prototype was the final step of the process.
The most challenging part of this process for us was learning about the strengths of each member of our team, and finding which parts of the design and prototyping process played to those strengths. We had to learn how to manage our resources and the team dynamic. By the end, these both became strengths for us.
The most gratifying part of the process was creating a satisfactory final product that everyone in our group could agree upon, created by every member, and using every person’s skills and expertise. It was a great outcome and we’re very proud of it.
Innovation: Do you have any insights on how the prototyping process has narrowed and better defined your idea?
Gerard: We brought our physical prototype out into Bangkok University to test it with different students, and learned a lot! We were forced to think about the system and incidents reporting in different ways – the students brought us back to the basics. Our solution was focused on new uses of technologies, the students reminded us that many people don’t own phones, or may not even be literate. We will be adding these points to our final presentation.
Innovation: How do you think your final presentation will go?
Gerard: We’re really looking forward to it. We have one team member who is great at giving presentations, so she’ll be the one to describe our idea to the judge’s panel. However, we will all work together to create the presentation and priority points together.
Innovation: Thank you for your time!
The green tables brightened the prototyping process.
Gerard and his team working on their project.
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