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The Final Step!

"Test, Fix, Re-Test" = not only a motto for launching a product, but a motto for life. I liked how the aysnc materials acknowledged "that the only way that you're going to grow as a creative individual is to acknowledge your failures, accept them, and learn how you can make an improvement." I think this is a fantastic take-away. In this phase, it's easy to become discouraged as holes are starting to be poked through your ideas or way of thinking by possible stakeholders, but getting very comfortable with the messiness of the process and the necessary feedback and critique is a part of being a prolific creative. As covered in class lecture, being prolific and taking more chances, aka producing more work, is really the only way to make real progressive achievements. I'm proud of what we've done as a group and of myself as an individual contributor. We have this final week now to truly explore how we want to present our idea in the deck and how to want to sell our hopes for a possible venture of a smart-ticket global transportation solution. I'm excited because I think the idea, while not entirely novel, has novel elements that expand it from previous proposals to something totally new. With enough research and consideration, I do think something of this scale could be implementable for the global community. Now more than ever, people are traveling again both within and around their communities and internationally. Our goal was to create a more egalitarian approach to that experience - to make it just a tad more equitable as best as we could. We understood our challenges, but small steps in the right direction are the actions we need to be taking to make real change for the better.

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Implementing - round dos

Further to our initial round of discussions for implementation, we were all truly energized and inspired by our Visual Value Proposition. By having to sit with the idea and distill it down to a bite-sized concept for a landing page, just as one example, it forced us to get clever and really consider what are the first interactions we want our user to have with our product. This in turn required us to consider who might be our most common users? Why is that? Are we isolating others? How do we remain inclusive? In addition to considering our active user, as we worked through the VVP we began to consider color themes, typography and general design. What is the brand aesthetic? What is priority information that needs to be communicated in the first few seconds? What visuals communicate that it’s a global solution? Do we want to offer a search by zip/location option to provide for geo-targeting?

While a landing page or any VVP may seem fairly straight forward in its requirements, it’s amazing how much more you must push your creativity in order to stick to a word diet- meaning get the message across with less words. Keep it simple but make it understandable. Inform, entice but don’t overwhelm. While editing the VVP in real time during a group call, we worked on image placements, text options and other general UI features while also considering the UX and User Journey of anyone who signs up to our application/service. To see it come to life in digital form felt like our biggest milestone yet. Needless to say we are excited to keep iterating.

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"The action phase"

I liked how the async materials called this the "action phase". There's something really exciting about arriving at this point. Like being lost at sea and finally seeing the pointy tip of dry land. Ok dramatic I know but truly, within our group discussions you could almost feel the smiles breaking across everyone's faces as we continue to connect more dots in the furtherment of achieving a real, successful product. Like.. is this a thing? Are we actually making a thing? Could this really work? *raises eyebrows a smidge higher each time*

Initially, we started so big with a grand hope of fixing transportation that it felt almost too broad to tackle. Some of our sessions, while productive, felt dizzying as our curiosities were running wild and all ideas sounded like great ideas. Ultimately, thankfully, we began to consider what was something we really wanted to see created in our own worlds of coming and going, our own transportation struggles. Something more universal, yet non-exclusive of course! And from that moment we've leaned very deeply into the cashback/rewards "smart ticket" that incentivizes users to select public transportation over a personal vehicle through a scalable, universal application that incorporates all major modes of public transports across major cities. A one-stop shop that makes taking public transport easier, but also rewards you for that choice.

In our last session, we employed the Moment of Truth technique by really distilling our brainstorms into a statement of intent that we could begin to build around. As our idea became more concrete, we continued with poking holes and asking all necessary stickler questions in oder to trim the fat, the excess of details that might bog our idea down. Each time we answered a question it was like checking it off the list and felt like another step in the desired direction. "Is walking a rewardable event?" "How will we integrate with Lyft and Uber", "Which cities are we targeting as priority in phase 1?". All the good, tough stuff. Eventually, we created a VVP and you could feel the rush of potential swell in our call as we started to see the actual visualization of our idea coming to life. We began considering our audience even more, discussing who does this serve and how will they interact with the experience. There's plenty more to do but it's certainly starting to feel more real than ever!

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IDEATION STATION

To ideation, I say hello old frenemy.

Understandably, or I assume for most, this is a fun but frustrating stage. For me personally, all my eager wiggles that demand control and consistency beg me to run away from the divergent chaos of swirling ideation. This has been much of my practice area, to learn how to navigate the divergence with acceptance and patience.

To be clear, it's not that I do not enjoy this stage. In fact, I crave this stage. But, the overly logical adult takes over and always aims to stifle the playful inner child. The child that once made music videos in the backyard with her best friends, letting days slip into weeks, not caring if it was published or seen or liked. Platforms for sharing were few and we spent summer days and nights in the sticky Georgia heat just ideating to ideate and creating just to create. As I grew up, the world and my inner pleaser began to demand deliverables. And with that, I started to require a purpose to all my activities. A definition, a reason. Everyone of course is nostalgic for a simpler past, but what I mean to impart here is that I began to fear ideation for so long because of too many "what ifs..." My mind would explode with all the possibilities and render my creativity near catatonic with analysis paralysis. It wasn't until I began to seek and absorb resources that illuminated my understanding around creativity and ideation that I began to not only welcome, but invite it. It started with reading more about the creative process and has since transformed into prompt and answer journaling.

These small, new habits have helped me to channel all the ideas around our chosen group topic, where I hold space for splattering everything against "the wall" with safe, but necessary disregard for judgement or critique. To quote Joan Didion, "I don't know what I think until I write it down."

So with writing things down, I dialogue the details and can come to a group session with thoughts to offer. Practices like communing with a group over a topic like transportation solutions has been a beautiful challenge in accepting the process and allowing curiosity to just flow. Pinging ideas off one another, expanding through sharing and narrowing through connecting has created some pretty awesome a-Ha! treasures. While our group is certainly still working through our vision, we've already grown so much around our understanding of transportation complexities and the future ahead. Our selection stage may also be challenging but we're closer to something new and remarkable each week.

To quote another author whose wisdom on the creative ideation process cannot be overstated, "It's a simple and generous rule of life that whatever you practice, you will improve at" - Elizabeth Gilbert

So the ideation practice continues on...

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Group Definition Session: Our Meeting of the Minds

After an hour of review and discussion, with each team member presenting their own musings on the problem, we arrived at an agreed statement for our definition (*celebration dance*) -

Problem Statement: In what way might we offer a personalized, accessible and reliable modular vehicle that brings the consumer from origin to destination, ultimately decreasing the dependency on car culture

Within this statement are individual nodes that address each of the concerns we discussed - both what we offered from our own unique perspectives and what we agreed on collectively. As we talked through our pain points, we cited the overlaps and wove those into our language, prioritizing common themes. We then paused to unpack human behavior around travel. If we're solving for Americans, specifically here in LA, we must consider that convenience and autonomy are huge priorities culturally. Although, this is not a phenomenon unique to the U.S. and if you asked anyone worldwide, they'd probably also agree that if it were possible for them they'd prefer convenience, comfort and a sense of choice in their travel, the reality is that these characteristics in commuting are quite a luxury to most.

After playing in the divergence of all the who, what, when, how, where, why - we began to converge and "picture success" as a technique and consider some of our transportation inspirations and how they fit into our vision. Our group lit up and for the first time we started to distill many of our disparate suggestions into cohesive proposals. Techniques we employed - boiling it down, talking/writing everything out as we exchanged thoughts, making a list of priorities, noticing our problems within the problem and even crossroads.

Ultimately, as part of problem statement goal setting, we understood that we did not need to "reinvent the wheel" but instead borrow from the research around us and apply that directly to the problem we want to solve.

This prototype below has already been built.. !!

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Definition sorta...

Defining the problem around transportation, again, has felt like catching a cloud. To start, before I could even play around with the ideas of hyperloops or airbuses or underground tunnels or rockets that get you from NYC to London in under 30 minutes (yes I saw a video on this-amazing!), I needed to fundamentally grasp and answer: what is it that's keeping people stuck in their transportation ways....?????

WHY are people taking ubers across town when there are trains and buses.

WHY, despite LA being incredibly flat in most areas, are people still driving 2-3 blocks to the grocery store.

WHY are they building more parking garages when we need more bike lanes.

WHY WHY WHY.

The answer = convenience. of course!!

And, in my pursuit to research this question/answer, why old transpo habits die hard, I stumbled on an article from laist.com that helped shed a bit more light on the matter - their base level argument is essentially that available space (aka more traffic lanes, more parking spaces, larger trains) isn't how we dwindle congestion, that they actually make it worse in fact. Instead, a major consideration must be in shifting fundamental car culture. In order to revolutionize transportation, you not only need to present futuristic options, but desirable options that outweigh the preference most people have for driving their cars.

"The easier you make it to drive, the more people want to do it"

With that sinking in, it helped me to understand that our problem has two sides - not only will our problem be the technological advances we face, but it will be a creative one in how we compel the masses to adjust their outlooks on mass transit and consider new options that aren’t their personal automobiles.

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Analyzing The Journey Ahead

When we gathered and had our meeting to analyze transportation issues and innovations, there was a pause among the group. Not because we did not know what to say, but because we had so much to say, where could we even begin? While on one hand, the start of anything is daunting, on the other it's the messiest you get to be. Like lucha libres in the ring, we let our thoughts go wild with all the versions of transportation from today and tomorrow. Do we want to stay on the ground, go to the air, take to the high seas? Do we want to solve a commuter problem or supply chain on a global scale? Do we want to enhance micro mobility or create larger, modular vehicles that grow and shrink depending on how many riders. There were noodles flying at every wall. It was a rich discussion where we posted thoughts to the shared doc, read them, made mention of what stood out and discussed. As we're all meeting digitally, the web and shared docs provided ways for us to research, link and consider. Healthy debate was encouraged and every idea was talked through. A sticking point was which exact issue in transportation do we want to focus in on? We narrowed down some ideas but did not solidly lock on one as we're leaving it open to more discussion and research. It's a vast field as one might imagine and we want to consider options that will do more than just offer a fun alternative, but rather solve greater societal issues, most likely specific to LA and congested cities in the United States. An insight we all gathered was that right now is an amazingly fruitful time in the space, there's a boom of new technologies and options and nothing feels off the table. The dreams of decades ago feel like the doable ideas of the coming years. If we can sync our goals and align our efforts, I think we can make a shift in the progress and add to the headway.

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Accepting The Challenge

I think we can all agree that generally speaking transportation in its mass form is totally unpleasant. Whether it's a crowded bus, an empty train platform late at night, a packed plane that only deboards from the front, an uber pool with a not nice drunk, the 101 freeway congestion after a Dodgers game - it's all bad. And yet, life is all about the going, the journey, the trip, the voyage - so how can we update this great part of our existence to make it a sought after experience vs. a constant discomfort? Can our group accept that comfortable, affordable, renewable modes of enjoyable transport can exist? Simply speaking, there are a probably one thousand solves in this ever-growing category, but I've paused to consider what it is about transportation that I personally, subjectively don't like and want to alter.

Firstly, I hate riding in cars. For context, I attended a camping trip when I was 16 for a friends birthday. I needed to return that Sunday morning for a lifeguarding shift, so I hitched a ride with a friend of a friend. I wasn't aware he'd stayed up drinking and I wasn't aware he was ok with driving in that condition, I simply, naively accepted the ride back to the city and propped up my pillow to nap before my shift. I dozed easily until suddenly I woke to the car fishtailing out of control and a blinking light coming towards us. We were swerving towards a cliff, which we cleared and rolled down a mountainside. I have no clue how I survived other than I am a huge believer in seatbelts because my airbag did not deploy when we landed upside down in a ravine. I share all these details to illustrate that there are tons of people out there like me, traumatized by car accidents who do not feel safe riding in fast-moving, human-piloted vehicles.

Now, this is where I pause to consider and accept how amazing it might feel to ride safely in a vehicle along a speeding highway and not clench the door frame. What if our group can offer an implementable addition to the growing evolution of transport change. What if we can make just one ride for one anxious rider better than the one before it. This would be transcendent! What if a mom could drive her kids with no fear of being side-swiped on the way to her baby's appointment. What if the elderly or sick could easily arrive at their check-up without problems getting in and out of a low seated car not equipped for them. What if LA could dispatch a fleet of autonomous vehicles run on renewable energy that collected excess foods from restaurants and dispensed it to those in need. My mind tracks in so many disparate directions when I consider "transportation", but if there's any city that's ripe for the conversion it's LA. A magical land that could be made even more magical through less cars. It's an intimidating topic but it's also an imperative one. What if transportation could be so well executed and fun that commuters enjoyed it more than the destination? Maybe what we do doesn't need to solve the whole industry, but I accept that even a little win in this category could make a huge difference to our communities.

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What's Creativity?

To me, creativity's meaning is found in the word itself - to create. The word draws its origins from Latin, creātus, meaning to beget, to give birth. In this sense, creativity is the power of origination. But, unlike birthing, creativity does not always require the manifestation of the physical. Creating is not confined by what you can produce but rather by what you can explore. It's the playful inclination to allow oneself to slip out of what should be the answer and indulge in what could be an answer. Though the answer is entirely beside the point. It's simply the doing that matters most. By simply doing, we affirm we exist.

To me, creativity is the questioning, the ideating, the unwillingness to accept that what is must always be. While creativity can certainly be structured, it's also that unique space where untethered freedom to explore and express is freely granted. Creativity is a place of safety. A universal language of meaning-making and a tool for coping and communicating for the people of the world.