Design Thinking used to solve everyday challenges

We often leverage Design in a business setting to solve business challenges. As a UX coach I often tell my teammates and students that Design Thinking could be leveraged to address, solve, and document common and not-so-common challenges we each come across in our daily lives. Raccoon-case-study.pdf

So that was the challenge in front of me in Fall of 2022. I had a pest visiting my residence over the course of 9 months. It was taking things from my property, and became a funny event each time it happened. At first, it would take food, then beverages, then it damaged items on my patio. Over many months I got really curious and started to document these events in a way I felt was not only interesting, utilized critical thinking, but was fun as well. My goal was to show students in my UX Class that even not-so-everyday problems could serve as inspiration for portfolio work.

***Above:*** An introduction to explain what the circumstances are with this household challenge. What started as an annoying issues, quickly became an exercise in Design Thinking and I chose to document my experience. I outline the What, Where, When, Why, and How.

Journey Mapping

I sketched and designed an unconventional journey map to document what events occurred over the course of 9 months. At first I was not clear what this intruder was, but it became evident once I installed a wildlife camera in my patio to catch the intruder red-handed.

***Above:*** I have fun with assumptions of what this visitor could be, and I also create an unconventional journey map. I sketched the images myself and refined them in Adobe Illustrator. The medium for this artifact is Mural.

Brainstorming and Ideation

Once I knew what animal was doing the damage, it was a question about what I could do about it. I formulated a “How Might We” statement that I followed with a brainstorming exercise, and then I grouped the ideas I had that could be potential solutions. It this point, I can all the random ideas and group them based on common patterns - a poor-man’s Affinity Diagram.

Impact Effort Matrix

Now it is a matter of determining what ideas are best, and what ideas are not feasible. What Ideas are easy to execute, and what ideas and too difficult to seriously consider. I do this leveraging an Impact Effort Matrix.

At the end of the day, we just want the raccoon or family of raccoons to go away. I didn’t want to trap them and have them displaced from a nearby nest or from their family. The best options was to deter the raccoon from coming back again by using spices that the animal might not find inviting. Since then, I have not had a problem with surprise night-time visitors in my patio.