‍The first evening of our Summer Academy started off with an inspiring introduction of Bednet and its challenges, after which everyone was invited to mingle and to get to know each other during a sunny BBQ. Yesterday, when the mood was just right, it was time for the real deal.

With the gained knowledge of day one, the three teams were totally motivated to take up the challenge. They clustered their notes from day one onto empathy maps, which helped to create a clear and visual overview of the different challenges. Those insights led to each team settling on one specific challenge statement. Something that is tangible enough, yet ambitious enough to solve. A ‘trailer’ of the challenge, you could say.

Funny enough each team ended up focussing on the same challenge: the social aspect of Bednet. How can we lower the threshold for people using the tool, so they feel less uncomfortable? The three teams will search different solutions to tackle this issue for different user groups. Some will focus on teenagers, whereas others focus on younger users.

After a delicious Greek salad, we were fully energized and ready to rock the ideation exercises. For each part of the challenge statements, we asked ourselves: “How might we solve this?” Through multiple ideation exercises, one of which is appropriately called “Crazy 8s” - or trying to come up with 8 different ideas in just 8 minutes, yes that’s crazy - we helped the teams to generate multiple ideas that could solve their challenge.

Out of those rough ideas, we distilled the best ones in a so-called ‘Solution Sketch’, a detailed sketch that highlights how the target audience discovers your solution, where the solution helps the audience to solve their needs, and finally what the desired outcome is. ‘This is so cool, I’ve been missing this way of working for years’, said Margaux.

At In The Pocket, we’re living the work hard, play hard lifestyle. That’s no different for the Summer Academy. So we rewarded our students and took them to KEUN, a microbrewery in Ronse, for a tour and beer tasting session. As this food experience left us wanting more, we ended the day with wine and cheese. We discussed heavy topics - apparently people in Limburg use the word ‘hamburger’ to describe almost every snack - and took a dip in the pool. We can't wait to show what we've been working on, but we'll need to prototype our ideas first. That'll be our main focus today!

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