I really enjoyed our class period dedicated to insight synthesis. There was a great blend of individual work and group work. My introverted side got to show and helped me be productive, and my extroverted side thrived as we began to collaborate amongst one another. Perhaps my favorite part of this exercise was branching out of my group and explaining my problem statement to someone who wasn’t familiar with the work we’ve been doing all semester. My partner’s group has a project scope related to innovating the assisted living housing market, while my group is focused on innovating college students’ lives. We both felt it was refreshing to lend our thoughts and ideas to totally different markets. During this stage, my problem statement saw a plethora of revisions. When I constructed the first draft, my long-term investment into the undergrad housing market subconsciously assume that everyone knew as much as I did. My statement was all over the place – I tried to include every problem I could think of. I’d written about sleep problems, social anxiety, and a problem balancing work and leisure. Also, I did a poor job of explaining my persona in general. I wasn’t specific at all and I only referred to her as the nickname my group had given her. Thankfully, my partner was able to address my lackadaisical effort at a first draft. He first had me address my persona and describe her in much more detail than I had before. Once we accomplished that, we then streamlined my train of thought to only sleeping problems, as my partner felt it would have the most potential to positively impact my persona. Not that social anxiety and balancing priorities aren’t important, but sleep seemed paramount of the three. I agreed with him!!
Once my group reconvened to synthesize our finalized problems statements, I became the process champion. I’d volunteered as the process champion at the beginning of the process, but because drafting our first problem statements was individual work, my duties as a process champion were limited until group work began because when we had to synthesize everything, collaboration was required. I approached the task at hand with an increased awareness to the doing things the right way. Not only did I have to succeed, but my group had to stay on track, too. Also, I believe I’d experienced a wake-up call from the numerous revisions I needed when I met with a member of a separate group. Also, I felt a bit of pressure in the back of my mind to make sure our final problem statement was what Professor Luchs was looking for. As we analyzed the work we’d done, we quickly realized that all three of us (one was absent) had defined completely different problems compared to one another. While I had focused on sleep, another partner was invested in the purpose of our persona’s spaces, and the third made an emphasis on productivity. In the end, our group all decided that focusing on problems within the space itself was the best idea. We decided that utilizing the space for multiple purposes was very important, and this was our final draft:
A debt-free, financially-comfortable, inexperienced undergrad student needs some structure to efficiently utilize her living spaces because her spaces serve different purposes and must reflect all aspects of her life, public and private (sleep, roommate issues, conductive work and social spaces).