#12 Blockbusting

How are you leveraging blockbusting in your thinking (reference class activities and readings as warranted)? What role might form play in your ideas?

The blockbusting reading and class activities were really interesting and inspiring, which made us look at our problem space and ideas from some completely mind-blowing angles. We do realize that sometimes there are stereotypes within our unconscious mind that may prevent us from being open-minded and creative. Therefore, we appreciate the class activities and Miro board activity we did to help ourselves remove those stereotypes.

Here is how blockbusting affects our thinking about the project:

Realizing our stereotypes

One stereotype we had was that learning finance was complicated and dry for students. Therefore, our design ideas were more about gamifying the learning content. However, we realized that such stereotype might not be true, since college students would have the cognitive abilities to handle that knowledge. Therefore, we need to make sure that our ideas are not too entertaining for our learners to lose interest.

Another common stereotype we realized was that freshmen generally have little knowledge of finance. However, it was also not true for all freshmen. Some freshmen may have more financial knowledge than others, which makes learning basic financial concepts a waste of time for them. Inspired by this, we may consider having multiple difficulty levels for our learners themselves to choose from.

Thinking about the problems in various perspectives

In this section of the Miro board, we were able to think of a lot of considerations that we didn’t come across previously. We looked at this problem space again from the perspectives of parents, students, teachers and policymakers.

We want to especially highlight the perspective of parents. Although parents are not our main target learners, their perspectives would be beneficial to improve our ideas. We had one note said, “I wonder what my pastor thinks?” One of our team members brought up that some students may consult everything with their pastor on top of their parents. This made us realize the role of religion may play in our topic. Of course, this wouldn’t be something crucial, but it did make us think about religion and culture may impact our learners. If money is not something that is talked about so often in some cultures, how might we help our learners to get better at asking financial questions for example.

Recognizing the stuff we may bypass

We also realized some points that we ignored before. For example, all of our ideas need our learners to be physically present in some places. However, we realized that people are lazy, and they might not find those activities worth their time. Therefore, we need to think about how to advertise those activities to attract people to participate. Apart from that, we also realized that longevity was something that we didn’t consider much before. We might need to think about how habit could play a role in each of these activities and how might student engage over time.

Utilize different senses!

This was something that we completely ignored in our ideas. We had a lot of fun and generated a lot of creative ideas especially for ‘touch’, ‘taste’ and ‘smell’. We thought these ideas could be combined with the escape room to enhance the experiential experience. For instance, we thought about using jelly beans to help our learners to differentiate food debt from bad debt; we thought about using physical analogies such as sand to teach inflation; we also thought about incorporating different smells of accommodations (cheap motel & 5-star hotel) to tell stories.

Final thoughts

As designers, we often have our own way of thinking about a problem. However, we should also realize that there might be some stereotypes at the unconscious level that block us from being more creative. We really appreciate the opportunity to conduct the blockbusting activities, from which we learned a lot about not only how to be creative but also how to think about our own thinking. We will go ahead and revisit our ideas and see how those new thoughts can be incorporated into them to enhance the learning experience.