FAB Ideation “Fighting the virus with innovative ideas” Report

FabCafe Hong Kong hosted the first FAB Ideation session on 27 Feb. This is a new series of events which aims to encourage participants to delve into different problems and explore creative solutions through design thinking practices. The first FAB Ideation was about “Fighting the virus with innovative ideas”.

Under the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak (COVID-19), Hong Kongers are facing different problems these days and their daily lives have been greatly affected. We would like to explore what solutions could be provided to those affected. There were 6 participants on the night and we got many interesting and innovative ideas.

We created 2 personas for participants to work on, a working mom and an elderly man. These two personas were very different from the participants’ own identity, which encouraged the participants to think beyond themselves and empathize with another’s needs and wants.

When participants were working on the “Empathy map” and “Day in the life” practices, they could think of different feelings of the personas, which helped them a lot on identifying the most urgent problem the persona is facing.

The group which was working on the elderly persona believed the persona should have very negative emotions these days due to the lack of social interactions with others. So the group planned to design a solution for him to re-access his social community.

In the second part of the session, participants started to find solutions for the problems. They came up with many ideas from “individual brainstorming” and wrote them on post-it notes. Then as a group they shared and organised their ideas on the “Affinity diagram”. After that, they did the “Folded brainwrite” to choose one of their best ideas and let others elaborate on their ideas.

Participants were having a lot of creative ideas that included the use of technology, bringing new experiences to daily routines, providing social services etc. They spent some time working on the “Concept sketch” then presented their ideas to everyone. At the end, all the participants did “NUF testing” to vote which ideas were New, Useful and Feasible. 

FabCafe is going to host more of these FAB Ideation sessions in the future and we will discuss different local challenges. We hope to acquire more of your creative ideas and we look forward to seeing you next time at FAB Ideation! Stay tuned for our event announcements on FabCafe website and our Facebook page.

Find more pictures from the workshop on Flickr.