Observation Exercise
Background
This exercise will help you practice your customer observation skills and also help you to develop a broader range of ideas for the project. Simply watching potential customer behaviors (unobtrusively) and talking to people is an excellent way to identify product opportunities. Remember the lecture on consumer persona. Any time that you are out and about is an opportunity to observe! This exercise will help your 2.009 project idea generation for your Team meeting 2. We realize this is tight for Tuesday lab teams, but you will also have more time between lab and the 6 ideas milestone. The locations below should be somewhat easily accessible. Josh will discuss consumers and personas in class on Monday and this ethnography primer might also be of help.Instructions
Team members should review the location options and pick one place to observe before your team meeting. If you would like to coordinate with classmates on other teams (working in teams of up to 3 people), please do. This can also help if time/availability is limited. The SIs can help with organizing who goes where (for example using a google form/slack or other scheduler), and if there are locations that are more pertinent to some of your ideas than those listed below, please feel free to add to the list. Suggested location options include:| an airport/bus/train station a machine shop a playground a busy intersection a community center a commercial kitchen a construction site a restaurant | a fire station a grocery or hardware store a gym a hiking trail an ice cream or candy store a laundromat a mall | a park a post office a clinic or doctors practice a sport practice or event a workshop or art studio a zoo or aquarium a club |