We are in the next stage of our design process: coming up with ideas to address our project. First, we took a step back and re-evaluated what main points we wanted our final product to have. Through several brainstorming sessions we broke down our question– “How can we help The Community Cloth attract more socially conscious customers by telling the individual stories of artisans at places that these people already frequent?”– into smaller components. We thought about “What about the individual stories do we want to include?” and “What do we want the conscious customer to know?” We all had a set amount of time, about 10 minutes, in each of these sessions and wrote all our ideas on post-its. We then categorized our ideas into different themes. Below is an example where in this brainstorming session we wrote down all the solutions we envisioned (no matter how crazy) for our project.
After discussing amongst our team and receiving feedback from another DFA team, we decided to move forward with a combination of several ideas: a postcard. We decided that this solution could serve as both a tag for the products as well as promotional material for The Community Cloth that could be put placed in fair trade establishments. We envision the postcard to have information about both a specific artisan as well as The Community Cloth, since we learned that many conscious customers have little to no knowledge about the organization itself.
Moving forward, we plan to receive feedback for this proposed concept at our Mid-Semester Review on how it can be improved and further developed. This concept would be testable because we can gauge reactions of conscious customers and listen to their opinions once we have developed a physical postcard. If our postcard idea were to be implemented by The Community Cloth in a certain span of time (ie. 2 months), we would be able to tell if having these in fair trade establishments helps reach more conscious customers and if including the postcard with products helps customers learn more about The Community Cloth and artisans (by including a survey or feedback form).
