During the empathy phase, we initially thought of many communities to focus on.
We wrote down a large list of communities that we could possibly target to create a service/product for,
as seen on the picture on the left.
Our first idea was to target environmental pollution and we actually came up with a possible problem to marine pollution: metal deposits. Our initial thoughts was to solve this by using electromagnets in a circular device that could attract these metal deposits.
However, we felt that it was extremely difficult for us to engage an organization IN SINGAPORE that actually focuses on metal pollution in the ocean. Besides that, we also did not have the technical skills to produce an electromagnet that could work in a device.
Our second idea was to target children with learning difficulties and elderly with dementia, by creating a product that helps them to learn/regurgitate words/letters easier. However, there was many constraints that we had, such as that we are not mental health professionals or knowledgeable enough to understand whether our product can have an impact on them and that it might be very hard to create a prototype of a service/product that could benefit them.
Our last idea was to target elderly with dementia with a handy product visualized in the picture below to remind them of important events and items. However, it seemed like the electronics of it was difficult to execute. Furthermore, we do not understand if the elderly with dementia would have a problem with remembering important items as we do not have prior knowledge on this possible issue.
After much discussions, we decided not to look at a specific community of a social issue, but rather observe the community to understand what problems they have in order to come out with a problem statement afterwards. We decided to narrow down to elderly and children, then ended up choosing elderly as we would be able to communicate with the elderly much easier than with children.
This leads us to creating an empathy map and engaging the elderly through organizations.
To proceed, click on ''Empathy Phase'' below
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