Abstract:

What do you do when you think your students understand segmentation? How can you assess them with a formative tool that is active and interesting to them? It even introduces a bit of competition. Product Architecture is a class exercise that works well in Marketing, Innovation, Social Justice and Sustainable focus, Design Thinking, as well as other areas. It is a chance to see how much the students understand about segments and at the same time let them actively learn and participate. It is about empathy and trying to understand the segment. It introduces or develops the ideas of personas.

In todays’ inclusionary environment students often struggle with differentiating a segment. They are not use to the idea that separate groups of people have dissimilar needs, shop in different places, and are drawn to different products to meet their needs. The authors have used this exercise across a large number of courses and have settled on a useful design for offering the exercise. In this paper the full process will be described in detail as well as the results with a recent class in Social Product innovation.

The participants get a real chance to investigate and think through a market segment which can be regional, national, or global. They get involved in researching that segment and hopefully thinking a little about empathy for the segment. They are asked to develop a typical persona for the segment including basic information about a typical segment member. Then then each team redesigns the product for that segment they have researched. Each team has two sketches, one of the persona, and one of the revised product. The process is explained in a step-by-step format so that others can used this formative educational exercise to help their students learn.

The team presentations give the professor a chance to comment on collected information, on what the students did with the collected information, and on the persona developed as well as the updated version of the product. The authors use the exercise in class in an ungraded format to assess where the students are and to encourage deeper understanding by the students.

Keywords:

Persona, Segment, Design, Model, Investigate.