To focus and structure to the ideation process we decided to follow the themes suggested by Tim Brown's in his text: "The Next Big Thing in Design" (see more here).

Working in individual sprints, we were able to generate a broader but well-defined list of potential ideas.

Later the dot-voted ideas were harvested using the Funnel of Focus, to kill the bad ideas and focus on the good ones more quickly. After the selection process, the team had a brief discussion and decided after to right down, individually, how the main research question could look like. Initially, we thought that the following research question was a good start:

Later on the process, this question was reframed and refined. We took it apart and assess if any parts that made up the whole would be able to stand on their own.

Tim Brown's greater challenges for design practitioners

To get a deep understanding of the problem and the audience we believe that discovering behaviors (what people do) is more efficient than asking for attitudes (what people say). However, since we were working in a self-designed brief, at this point talking with people would be helpful to get more clarity on the problem. We spoke to a mix of Facebook and Twitter users and experts in online communities, social media and behavioural science to conduct individual interviews.

We had a very interesting interview with Rob Morris (picture on the bottom), Ph.D. MIT Media Lab and Creator of Koko, an online community that uses cognitive reframing and crowdsourcing to help people deal with stress and anxiety. Rob said:

From this point onwards the goal of humanising social interactions on the internet started to present itself as a solid direction to that we would follow.

Later we also conducted some contextual enquiries, simply watching and listening to people while they were using online communities and prompting questions to understand specific behaviors they were showing.

A couple of online surveys were also sent in order to get a deep understanding of people's online behavior, needs and frustrations.

One of the most insightful behaviors reported by the people who answered our survey

At this point, we downloaded (IDEO's expression for compiling data collected during research phase) a huge amount of data collected during the research stage, which was done both individually and with the group. Later, we used a simpler version of affinity diagramming to group the ideas and data into themes. We applied the Impact and Feasibility Matrix to understand what ideas could have the higher impact and the lower effort. This was particularly useful to create consensus around what opportunity areas were available and which direction should the project follow, by reframing the initial brief.

After this stage, we felt prepared to draw some "How Might We" questions out of the opportunity areas. The "How Might We" question selected for the final brief was the following:

Detail on the flow of how to extract "How Might We" Questions from scattered ideas

After the reframing the brief and defining our final problem statement we were prepared to start developing possible solutions. On the root of the problem, one of our main findings goes as follows:

We felt the need to create an ecosystem of tools and experiences with integrated subsystems, online and offline to tackle in a holistically way the problems of violent online communication in any of its multiple forms: harassment, bullying, trolling, etc.

At this stage, we were looking to validate or invalidate the insights and other qualified assumptions we extracted from the research stage.
So we started fast prototypes of many different ideas:

After developing and testing these prototypes we felt it was barely impossible to develop one fits all solution for this problem we proposed to solve. We need to narrow it down just to an angle. But we wanted to THINK BIG and Gill Wildman (our project coach) was encouraging us to do so! Thus instead of narrowing down to a specific angle, or dropping ideas just because they didn't solve the whole, we hacked the process. We gave a step back and started thinking of a system — constellation of products and services, both online and offline to help us " turning conflicts into something affirmative and constructive within a community".

When the people starting entering the room to see the presentation they could read on the projection "Write a letter to a friend" and see different letter templates, branded with HOI, lying on every chair. To us, it was really important setting the stage and provoke the audience before starting the pitch. Most of the people in the audience shared that they didn't remember last time they have handwritten a letter to someone... That gave us the foundation to build a case around our brief's question: "How might we turn conflicts into something affirmative and constructive within a community?"

After getting people's attention, we knew they were more keen to understand our proposition. We presented the website as our MVP but also walk them through our vision of creating a system — constellation of products and services, both online and offline.

The Humans of The Internet constellation of products and services.

This was the first group project of my MA at Hyper Island. Humans of the Internet taught me a lot of lessons indeed.

The first lesson was about learning how culture is absolutely critical to build a strong team and develop a great work. I also learned while in the research stage that finding the right balance between individual and group tasks really increases efficiency and decrease the risk of team burnout.

Given the specific open characteristics of this brief, my biggest takeaway was definitely to see how comfortable I feel thinking and understanding BIG PROBLEMS in its overwhelming complexity.