This second phase of my mentorship was primarily further discussing concepts with my mentor, Grace. I was struggling with this ideating part the most. The feedback that she gave me was that I needed to generate more questions around the problem and she gave me a lot of tips around good design thinking. It was a new way of ideating for me. One of the problems I was also struggling with was choosing a specific problem to tackle because Zero Waste encompasses a lot of different aspects. We communicated through email during this phase because I was running slightly behind schedule and sent her some notes from my document of questions I formulated and potential ideas that could come out of those. She explained the difference between problem-solving questions and research questions and how through asking these more problem-solving questions and doing the research, I’ll eventually hit the “right” problem-solving question – which may appear ambiguous but feel actionable. I don’t have any images to show for this part because it was mainly communication through email. Eventually, I settled on a good problem-solving question, which Grace helped me with refining: How might we make recycling convenient and engaging in Vancouver to promote waste reduction?
After landing on this, I quickly began to create a site map and started sketching my wireframes. Creating these helps me easily map out what the major pages I need to make, and quickly put down interface ideas. Here they are:
I would give myself 9/10 for this phase because I worked extremely hard to deliver as much as possible and keep on schedule. I learned a lot about ideating with my mentor and being able to create problem-solving questions to surround my design around.