“Find your passion, whatever it may be. Become it, and let it become you and you will find great things happen FOR you, TO you and BECAUSE of you” said T. Alan Armstrong, an American writer of children's stories. This is the main idea from my last academic and personal experience.
LAPASSION is the acronym of Latin-America Practices and Soft Skills for an Innovation Oriented Network. But passion is also the emotion in this project.
Last December, I applied for this program developed by the UDELAR, the Public University of the Republic of Uruguay and the UTEC, the Technological University. At the end of January the public resolution of selected candidates came out. On February, I was involved in a maelstrom of procedures to manage my stay in Montevideo.
PROJECT
My flight lands on Sunday March 11 at the Carrasco Airport. I travel with other selected Spanish student who I had contacted when the list of participants was known. The sun is striking in the Uruguayan capital. As soon as we leave our suitcases in the apartment we have rented together, we explore our neighborhood.
Monday dawns muggy and that week I discover that Uruguay has many days that seem like four seasons: it rains, the sun rises, the temperatures rise remarkably and again they go down. We arrive to a nice building, diaphanous, of those of colonial beauty, with big roofs and long windows. I feel excited so I can’t remember who I met first or who tried clumsily to say hello with two kisses instead of one. I only remember a feeling of good reception and closeness.
Under the title "Improving the quality of life of childhood", the project begins. During the first 5 days, all participants have intensive days and activities to break down cultural barriers and getting to know each other. From these first exercises, I create my first dictionary of Uruguayan jargon:
One prawn= 100 pesos
One stick or juana = 1000 pesos
Medeo = Montevideo
Bondi = Bus
Be in the oven= Be in a complicated situation
Chacra = field
Cheto = preppy
Chel = a bottle of beer
We are 30 university students from different disciplines: engineering, communication, industrial design, architecture education... Twenty of the members are Uruguayan while the others come from Brazil, Chile, Spain or Portugal.
One of the first activities is to tell an anecdote of our childhood. We do various recreational activities related to childhood like playing board games or legos.
Little by little, we remember the language and codes of our childhood and we learn to work in groups. To the end of the week, we make five groups with five people. My team chooses between one of the three sub-themes proposed in the project: health and nutrition; recreation and free time; or education. Our election is recreation and free time.
DESIGN THINKING
We begin the research phase and problem definition in the second week. One of the fundamentals of this methodology is to get involved with real people, so we went out to interview adults and children and we tried to put yourself in the skin of the user. Moreover, we try to respect this principles:
Observe with the eyes of a tourist. We should forget what we have internalized
Pay attention to the details
Soak up the context
Dedicate time to people
Observe the groups, their dynamics and interactions
Read and listen to the experts
Find inspiration in new places
Leave the comfort zone
We come into contact with reality, problems and particularities, so we can discover insights.
The (user) needs (need) because (insight)
GENERATION OF IDEAS
Next phase in the creative process is the generation of ideas. On the one hand, convergent thinking is characterized by a concrete response . On the other hand, divergent thinking doesn’t follow patterns and explores between different possibilities. In order to reach a concrete response at the end of the process, we have started a phase of divergent thinking where we try to accommodate all possible options and solutions to the problem that is presented to us.
For this phase, it is interesting to put into practice several of the creative techniques that teachers indicated to us.
Brainstorming. In 1983, Alex F. Osborn understood that this process allowed to expose ideas freely into a group. He corroborated there were ideas more varied, spontaneous and creative in a group. This technique acquired great relevance, especially in the field of marketing and advertising. When applying this technique it is important:
- Do not make judgments
- Do not ask for explanations
- Build sentences and not words
A variant of Brainstorming is Brainwriting, where the members of the group write their ideas silently and show them to the rest.
Method 365. The members of the team develop 3 concrete ideas in just 5 minutes. At the end he shows his ideas to the partner, who can use them as information or inspiration in the next round. The process is repeated 6 times and a large number of proposals and versions emerge.
Six Hats to Think About. The team members wear hats. Each hat represents a role or way of thinking and they are exchanged, so that the creatives adopt different points of view.
Forced Relationships This is a dynamic developed by Charles S. Whiting in 1958. It consists in relating concepts or ideas that apparently are not related with. In this way, combining the known with the unknown forces a new situation.
SCAMPER. This method is based on a basic idea which changes with different actions:
- Substitution
- Combination
- Adaptation
- Modification, magnification, minimization
- Proposition of new uses
- Elimination
- Realignment
The LAPASSION project is focused on developing lateral thinking and the acceleration of innovative ideas through teamwork. In Spain, the University works on a very formal and written language level and in a Uruguayan University, the students dominate oral discourse perfectly. Likewise, they try to distance the academic world from theories in order to focus on the problems of their environment and intervene them in an interdisciplinary way. I think we should look for an intermediate point between both realities, and I believe that this path is being drawn with the cultural exchange and with this type of projects.
Almost at the mid-point of the project, the calm and quiet streets of Montevideo continue to revolutionize my interior. I’m eager to take advantage of every second of this opportunity in which there is so much passion ...
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