We began this week by tackling the first step in the human-centered design process, Identify. Identify is the process where we hope to define targeted problem spaces that we will address in our future research. During the identify process, Team Magpies and Peacocks began by specifying our users and our stakeholders. In addition, we researched any existing solutions in industrial warehouses or donation processes. Lastly, we tackled any knowledge gaps we had regarding our problem space and our community partner, helping us discover some key assumptions we had in the process.

A major step in the identity process is pinpointing what assumptions our team has and how that might affect our perspective on the problem space and possible solutions. One key assumption our team ran into is that we thought the problem of the donation process was exclusively due to Magpies and Peacocks’ physical warehouse space. As we thought about the facts and questions we had about the project, a majority of them dealt with the physical space versus an organization or a human resource problem. Once we recognized that assumption, we were able to step back and consider our problem space through a new lens. We stepped back and proposed new questions that were not specific to a spatial problem. The identity step is crucial to the human design process and will drive our research in the immerse step of the human design process.