Week 3 - Absolute Beginners*
As I have already written I love beginnings and consequently I love being a beginner. More precisely, I enjoy those feelings that you have when you do or see something for the first time. You are free from almost all the possible prejudices that grow with experiences and you are more curious and opened. For this reason, I particularly enjoyed the work about empathy done during the third week. After having built our network, in fact, we wanted to understand how the people involved see our project. As said by Eman Abouelatta during a skype call with the entire crew of the Bootcamp, “we need to look at our innovation projects through different lenses”. This is not always easy, because we have to clear our mind from all we already know and leave space for other perspectives; we have to act as if we were true beginners. One has to work on his ego and his ability to listen; skills that are not always easy to acquire.
We interviewed many people, but the aim of our work was not just to collect simple quantitative information. We wanted to go deeper, to let the person speak about his/her attitude toward the problem we are trying to solve. It was not just a matter of words, but mostly of unspoken sentences, emotions and gestures. For this reason, we summed up the content of our interviews in a so called empathy map divided in 4 sections according to what the person said, did or felt. Once we collected all the different interviews we tried to build an ideal profile of user focussing on the characteristics shared by the people we interviewed and mostly on the needs that they felt as more urgent.
To conclude, precisely those needs are motivating us in keep working on our projects. We can feel we are contributing in improving things. Even if sometimes it is not easy to create a connection with the people we are interviewing, we are learning to go on and to iterate our prototypes through their eyes, as true beginners.
*Absolute beginners song by David Bowie
