We were excited to meet our mentor for the first time – Ms. Leow Choon Lian. Initial icebreaking was done by introducing ourselves to each other and discussing about the various aspects of her choosing our projects – why did she choose ours out of so many different projects? It turns out she was interested in the challenges of finding out user needs in our project.
After that, we discussed about the various planning that goes into a project such as scoping, stakeholder analysis and management tools. We had found a wealth of knowledge as we never knew that so much work was involved in planning! We also discussed the September deliverables and what do they exactly mean and formulated a plan for our next meeting. By the next meeting, we would be able to master Trello as a project management tool and would have formulated a stakeholder’s map.

After our second meeting, we have decided to come out a survey to check the hypothesis of our project. After comparing different existing online survey platforms, we chose Googleform as our survey platform since it provides powerful logic-jump function and clean user interface. Through the survey, our purpose is:

• To understand our donor profile and whether we have a big enough supply base
• To understand-how people often change smartphones
• To understand their behaviour when they change smartphones
• To understand why people do not want to donate smartphones to charity
• To understand the donor's willingness to give away smartphones to charity
• To understand donor's concern

Through the survey, we want to validate the following assumptions:

• We have reasonable proportion of people who possess 2 or more smartphones.
• People who have 2 or more smartphones are more likely to donate their smartphones to charity over people having 1 smartphone.
• People who donate smartphones are concerned with loss of security, privacy and monetary loss for not able to sell the smartphones.
Thanks to the help from our mentor Ms Leow Choon Lian, we learnt how to design the survey questions without any ambiguity or subjectivity.

Below is the link of our survey, we wish you can kindly spend 2 minutes to answer the question and help our project, thank you!

https://goo.gl/EqTj23

In the surveys that we have given out in the holidays, we managed to gather 145 responses (already boosted once when we posted it in Facebook’s SUTD group chat). From the responses, we managed to validate some of our assumptions – namely that there are a lot of people willing to donate their smartphones and that most people aren’t aware of any smartphone recycling program available. We also discovered that most people changed their smartphone in 2 to 3 years’ time which is not until the end of a smartphone’s lifespan. We used the information to reframe our design opportunity, which became “How might we work with NGO or NEA to collect used smartphones thus improving the efficiency of their project?”
We handed in the 12th September deliverables and the 14th September team dynamics assignment as well.
 

In this meeting, we aim to bring the new members up to speed to our project so far. We updated the new members to our project and asked them to give some inputs. We seemed to be confused about the project direction as some thought that it should be profitable while some didn’t like the idea of being the middleman between donators and NGO. After discussion, we decided to take the original idea of making the phone traceable and integrate it to the NGOs’ operation while we sought out original ideas.
We also managed to draft the e-mails to NGOs and send it out.
 

In our 4th meeting, we let all our members meet the mentor, Choon Lian. We started the meeting by introducing the new members to the mentor. Choon Lian asked them the reason for them to choose our projects. Cherry said she was interested in the business aspect of it, while Lek Ee liked the social aspect of the project.
After informing Choon Lian of our doubts in the project’s objectives, we managed to get some clarification from her and sent an e-mail to the Design Odyssey team on the questions she didn’t know the answers to. We also updated Choon Lian on the Design Odyssey bootcamp, our September deliverables and what have we done so far. Using the results of the survey, Choon Lian listed out the findings that were important and stated that we have to base our design opportunity on this. The few opportunities that we found were to increase awareness, extend the life of smartphones by reusing it, increase the convenience of donating smartphones as well as find a way to address the security concern of donators.
We did a vote on the four opportunities as a starting point above and we will start from increasing awareness. The design opportunity associated with this is “How might we increase awareness of the people to donate smartphones”. Due to the small amount of people who did the survey, we decided to re-post the survey and gather more information. At the same time, we would also contact local NGOs in Singapore to see whether they have a user need for smartphones. This information will then be used to contact NEA and we will form partnership with them.
We also discussed about the October 18 deliverables which would be a proof of concept of our idea and a few iterations of the prototype. Choon Lian suggested that we approach our classmate and the people who answered our survey and leave their e-mail contacts for feedbacks. Right now, the prototype idea still remains the web app that connects the donators to the individual recipients. However, we may add in additional features such as data deletion for security and interactive e-waste bins to encourage donation.
By the next meeting, we will have already found some local NGOs with the need of smartphones, extended our survey to more people so that we have enough information to contact NEA.
 

In this meeting, we discussed the prototype functions and what features of our prototype to achieve them. Prior to that, we agree that the target audience that we are searching for this time would be underprivileged children from Children homes. This is due to workers having purchasing power and they are less needy. In case our project needs to change the target audience, we can always pivot our prototype in that direction.
We then listed out the functions that we need to fulfill and list down some ideas. The functions are to increase awareness of donation of smartphones, simplify the process of donating smartphones, making the donation of smartphones secure as well increase the motivations to donate smartphones. The traits of our prototype that we discussed that would fulfill these requirements are (in this order): Giving out homemade gifts from children to entice donators, going door-to-door to get the smartphones, feature the official method to delete data in the phone as well as connecting the donator and recipient safely.
After putting the framework down for our prototype we then proceed to fill up the skeleton of the prototype and discuss about the details. We think the prototype will be a pilot test that last a month using the phones we collect from some donators. We will target those who have done our survey and note their interest to ask for donations. We will ask the donators and recipients to communicate for a month using our web app. We will use our budget to ask the children to make gifts as well as to buy Strikingly Pro to host our web app.
By the next meeting, we would have contacted the orphanages and are ready to approach NEA.