During Team Period’s ideation stage, we worked to take our user insights and new and improved How Can We Statement to generate ideas for what our solution could look like. During Open Studio, we began this process by thinking individually about different potential solutions on post-it notes. After we had time to think and process individually, we gathered as a group and put them into general clusters, which we found to be education/stigma reduction and physical period product-related solutions.
After a few days, we regrouped for our team meeting. There, we went about the same process again during our reframe session. Yet, instead of just clustering our ideas, we placed them on a graph of feasibility where we looked at what we thought was not only feasible, but how exciting it was to us. It was during this phase that we decided that a physical solution would be our desired result. Knowing that we wanted a physical solution, we understood that this could look like many different things. We were intrigued by Period.@Rice-BCM’s Period Packs, which they distribute to local non-profits, and tried to see if there were ways we could apply this to Rice students. Some included created a DIY-packing system where people could approach a station and put what they wanted in their packs, and others were more focused on a more controlled relationship between the user and stakeholder (bring back bag to be refilled by stakeholder). Another idea was a “subscription-box” type service, where those who wanted to be included could have access to a monthly service. Ultimately, we want our solution to be intuitive, non-burdensome to implement, and accessible for all users. In our ideating stage, we took these primary values and tried to find physical-solution-specific design goals that worked in tandem with them. For period packs, these included, having multiple, high quality products packaged together, something that erases stigma of taking more than one, being convenient to carry, and including areas of variation (ie. multiple options pads, tampons, etc).
This week was hugely formative for our group as it allowed us to solidify our goals in order to make an implementable solution a nearer reality!
