Sunday, March 2, 2008

The Story of "Ready, Aim ..."




So here's the update on the Rubber Band challenge for InnovationWeek.

Here's the video and the story of the tournament.

First of all, I'm so happy. Ready, Aim ... received two extremely great prizes from the Illinois InnovationWeek.

The first is breakfast with Henry Petroski, a civil engineering professor, University of Illinois alumni and prolific author. He will be on campus for a Design Matters series lecture on March 11. Here are some of his books if you are interested. I plan to read The Toothpick: Technology and Culture before meeting him.

The second is a day at Ideo, an innovation and design firm. We'll be going to the one in Chicago. I'm really excited about this visit.

Now that it's over and prizes have been awarded, I can reveal what we did and the idea behind the project, as well as the value created.

Here's our project description:

Don't you wish your best guy friend had better aim in the toilet?

Well, we thought so too. And we thought people could do better with some target practice. So we got students from our university to play a game.

In "Ready, Aim ..." the students got to practice their aim with a rubber band– not a trivial task bitter winter cold of Urbana-Champaign! Not only did we give students a chance to have some fun, but we also managed to casually approach the "toilet" issue.

We cemented the concept by handing out tags that they could hang around their toilets. One guy, however, thought it was cool enough to hang in his car!


As for the value created, we were aiming for social value by using the rubber band as a vehicle to approach a sensitive topic, which will lead to cleaner toilets for everyone.

For other entries from all over the world, visit Stanford's eweek group on YouTube here.

2 comments:

Suet Li said...

hey! random comment but i love your pop up cards!! i've been staring at them for hours just to learn how to make them haha

tracychong said...

Thanks! I love your blog :)