This week we pivoted back to the Distracted Driving Domain that we spoke about a few weeks ago. This seemed like a good direction to take and further develop. Our assignment this week was to come up with a solution for our How Might We:
How might we help Danielle keep her eyes on the road while driving?
Following that, we were to implement the chosen solution and write a scenario and four-step flow.
Yumi is the name we came up with, and in Japanese, it means friend (depending on how it's spelled in Kanji). Our prototype was given this name because the idea is for it to be the driver's companion, assisting him in driving safer and better. The name was inspired by the name of my dog, who is definitely a companion to me.
We described in the scenario how Yumi would help Danielle stay focused while driving. Yumi will alert Danielle when she stops looking at the road, if she is distracted, and will use some sort of exogenous stimulus to remind Danielle to look at the road straight ahead again. The stimuli are meant to act as a kind of nudge, an economic term borrowed from behavioral economics. We still need to determine how she will alert Danielle, how she will reinforce positive behavior, and how we will establish the companionship and attachment between Danielle and Yumi.
We prepared a 2-minute pitch and designed a presentation to present to the mentors on the following Sunday. The pitch described the domain, the problem, and the need. We provided a few statistics that validated the problem. Yumi was then introduced, along with her role as a car companion for drivers.
Our next blog post will describe the speed mentoring event and the feedback we received from each mentor. đđ˝đđ˝