Hasta La Ideas

Photos by Sarah Rottenberg, Yilin Lu, Yoshi Araki and Anna Couturier

By Mathieu Turpault, Director of Design, Bresslergroup

Last summer, we got to live vicariously through a group of Integrated Product Design students at the University of Pennsylvania who traveled to Ghana.

They were conducting ethnographic research at the Yonso Project, a Ghanaian rural organization that provides educational and economic resources to help people in the region break the cycle of poverty. In 2009, Yonso added a bamboo bicycle workshop to their roster of empowerment programs. The workshop builds skills by training locals to make beautiful bamboo bike frames that are sold internationally. It creates jobs, leverages local production from the bamboo plantation, and helps fund Yonso’s educational initiatives.

Strategy and Research

While the folks at Yonso are incredibly knowledgeable about their core initiatives, they’re not as experienced in product development. They approached UPenn for help in 2012 when they wanted to expand their bamboo product line. In turn, Sarah Rottenberg, Associate Director at the Integrated Product Design program, asked Bresslergroup to help mentor the students who were going.

Sarah and the team of IPD students, Yoshi Araki, Yilin Lu and Anna Couturier, visited our offices last spring for a couple of strategy and ideation sessions with our designers and engineers. We guided them through brainstorming and ideation exercises, talked about how we prepare for conducting ethnographic research and brand language development, and suggested strategies for narrowing and choosing product categories that could be pursued most successfully. We’ve gone through this process many times before, for many different types of products, so we’ve run into walls and we know how to avoid pitfalls.

Read more in our blog post about brainstorming about how we structure this phase of the design process.

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