IDEO CoLab Makeathon

My IDEO CoLab Teammates: Myself, Karíme Esper, Zach Frew, Emmeline Cardozo (not pictured [she came in for the day and had to catch a plane])

I was chosen out of a pool of 100+ applicants to participate in a one day makeathon with IDEO CoLab. I traveled to IDEO CoLab’s location in Cambridge, MA. My team and I were given the challenge to create a digital wallet that could be applied to a human need. Our team decided to focus on how blockchain could be applied to creating a wallet for personal data.

For a use case, we focused on using the check-in experience at a doctor’s office to be the point of safe and efficient transfer of medical records. Our goal was to give patients more autonomy over their records and help eliminate the lengthy time period of transferring records from doctor to doctor.

What I learned/validated:

• Diverse teams bring diverse perspectives :)
• Blockchain is great for more than just cryptocurrencies.

What I would have liked:

• More time to get to know people outside of my team & our support staff
• Ethnographic research opportunities (one can dream :D )
• Time to test our prototype’s value proposition by user testing. It would have been great to be able to have user stories to validate our prototype or reassess our approach.

Assets that came in handy:

• Being flexible
• Asking questions
• Having a diverse multi-disciplinary background
• Experience with working with a variety of skill sets and people
• Being open to make

This makeathon was exercise in being efficient in using the design thinking process and applying a variety of prototyping tools. I had fun working and learning with my teammates. We got helpful feedback from IDEO CoLab staff and from fellow makeathoners.

Curious about what we made? Check out the overview I created here.