Now that you've chosen an area to focus on for this design project, each member of your design team should interview three or four people to better understand their attitudes, practices, hopes, and fears regarding sustainability in this area. Truly understanding their needs is the critical first step in our design thinking process and will help you in developing useful composite character profiles.

Create at least four Composite Character Profiles that will help you to define your POV statements.

Create How Might We questions (that are broad enough to seed your thinking about a wide range of solutions, but narrow enough to prompt your collaborators to think of specific unique ideas that answer the questions) based on two or three of your most promising POV statements. Prepare these How Might We questions before the start of our class session, and we'll use them during our next class session to begin ideating within your design team as well with other design teams to help generate potential solutions to consider.

Create a description of the features of your Minimum Viable Product (MVP), based on the brainstorming and selection activities during our Jun 28 class session. You should continue ideating within your design team to refine vision of the essential features of the product that you'll be proposing, then itemize those features — the absolute must-haves — in your MVP description.

You'll be using this MVP to guide your detailed design of the product your design team is proposing as a solution to the needs you've identified. And the features that you've identified as essential will the be the ones that will be most important to prototype and test during the next phase of the design thinking process.