At 3M, I worked as part of the Medical Solutions Division (MSD) team and the Food Safety Division (FSD) for the Healthcare Business Group. I worked as part of an amazing multi-disciplinary team, with UX designers, Industrial designers and design researchers. Working as a design researcher, I got to lead and support several design projects working on UX, hard goods and service design projects.
Separation & Purification Sciences Division
Design Researcher > Healthcare > 2 months
My first project as design research lead was a project for the SPSD team. This group focused on delivering pure water at both, a ‘Residential’ and ‘Food Service’ scale. This portfolio includes a wide range of service offerings including, water filtration systems, water purification filters, a maintenance service system and more.
I was brought on this project to lead a discovery research project to identify NPI/NTI opportunities for 3M’s water purification space.
Project Objectives
Build a high capability point of use, water purification platform that leverages a cradle-to-grave approach to provide ultra-pure water while capturing the contaminants to clean the environment.
Driving a 'new to the world' contaminant management approach
To better understand the new space of water purification, we talked to some of our in house experts in the field; application engineers. From our quick session with them, I constructed two loose journey maps that I would use as a starting point during our upcoming workshop.
The first journey map captured the journey of the customer and 3M’s role in the ‘Residential’ water space and the second map captured the ‘Food Service’ space.
Since, the timeline of the project was rushed, we didn’t have much time to familiarize ourselves with the space. We decided that the most efficient way to move towards achieving our goal was to conduct a discovery and ideation workshop with our 3M SPSD team.
Workshop Objectives
Review and discuss customer journey map for both Residential and Food Service
Ideation on Sustainability attributes of a new “clean-sheet” design
Create a list of preliminary concepts to be potentially vetted through a Marketing Insights Study/Customer VOC
Assist the team and business leadership in project scoping
For this workshop we leveraged our remote and on site team, making this our first hybrid workshop. With a total of 17 participants, our participants including Lab techs, Manufacturing, Sales and Marketing, Industrial designers and design researchers.
Workshop Overview
Duration: Approximately 5.5 hours
Pre Workshop
Part 1: Prep Work
Curating Journey Maps for Residential and Food Service
Identifying Sustainability case studies and goals
During Workshop
Part 2: Discover
Presentations
Reviewing Current State Journey Maps
Identifying Opportunity Spaces
Part 3: Ideation
Team Ideation Activity; in this case, Crazy 8s
Ideation share out and reflection
We started the workshop with Phase 2: Discover.
Reviewing Project and Sustainability Goals
Started the Workshop with presentations from our business team and project managers, to discuss project goals and objectives, along with some sustainability goals and case studies
Our Sustainability designer then presented sustainability goals and approaches.
Grounding Activity
To ensure that all participants were familiar with the Pure Water space, we reviewed the journey maps prepared pre-workshop.
Participants were encouraged to build on these journey maps and identify missing events, discrepancies, thoughts and ideas to the maps. These maps were used to promote discussions, particularly highlighting the plus/pain points of the product-customer journey.
Opportunity Spaces
After getting acquainted with the journey maps the team started to identify 'Areas of Opportunity'.
These opportunities were framed in the form of "How Might We..." questions.
Part 3: Ideation
Each workshop participant was provided with a set of ideation tools that they could chose to work with.
As a team we decided to use the 'Crazy 8s' ideation activity.
Crazy 8s
How it works:
Each workshop participant is given a piece of paper with the crazy 8s template
The goal is to draw or write one idea per square. You have 1 minute to fill in each square.
This quick ideation technique doesn't give time to critique, refine or overthink ideas. They just need to scribble something down in that small box and then keep the ideas flowing as they move on.
Ideation Findings
By the end of the workshop we had:
Improved upon journey map visuals
Plenty of identified areas of opportunity spaces, framed in the form of How Might We (HMW) Questions
Preliminary ideation activity results
Post Workshop
Synthesis and Exploration
Sorting through the identified areas of opportunity
During the workshop session we were able to identify areas of opportunity
We framed these in the form of open-ended 'How Might We...' Questions
Upon affinitizing these HMW questions we were able to identify our refined opportunity spaces which we could explore (as shown in orange).
Solution Delivery Spaces
We mapped the HMWs by solution delivery spaces by the following categories
Products / Technology
Infrastructure
Partnerships / Service
Sustainability Approaches
Reorganizing through a sustainability lens
Using the Sustainability Approaches visual, we organized the HMWs according the sustainability categories of 'Reduce, Circularity, End of Life and Social Good'.
Eco Design Wheel
Aligning HMWs with sustainability goals
Once we had identified our potential opportunity spaces, we created a visual graphic that would allow us to map these spaces in accordance with our sustainability focus areas.
We then sorted these HMW questions into "step – jump – leap" categories which are represented in the outer three rings.
Areas of Opportunity
Organized Step - Jump - Leap
(Along the x-axis) We created a linear bucketed journey map to generally encapsulate the 3M pure water journey and then mapped the solution areas along this journey.
This would help us understand which part of the journey would potentially be affected by the HMW.
(Along the y-axis) We kept the assortment of HMWs by "Products/Tech, Infrastructure and Partnership/Service" so we still have an indicator of the solution offering type.
Next Steps
From the discovery and ideation activity we were able to determine that there is immense potential, but lots of complexity in the details.
It is imperative to dive deeper into technical, business and market tradeoffs to really understand the opportunity space and learn more about how we, as 3M can make an impact in this journey.
Our focus should be SPSD Sustainability as a Strategy; what does sustainability really mean for SPSD and our stakeholders.
Where are the pressures coming from? (3M ESG commitments, customer requirements, regulatory, legal liabilities)
Where is 3M positioned to create/capture greatest value and impact?
What are success metrics, level of ambition, etc. ?