This is the first in a three-part series of articles on how Home Depot uses design sprints. To find out more about how the company—and other design-forward large organizations—uses design sprints, check out our latest book on DesignBetter.Co, Enterprise Design Sprints.
[invDropcap]O[/invDropcap]ne of the great things about the design sprint is that it’s customizable. A design sprint is simply a framework around which to base your exploration into your most important product decisions.
Especially when it comes to larger enterprises, some customization might be necessary.
While writing Enterprise Design Sprints, in which Home Depot is prominently featured, I spoke to Brooke Creef, UX manager at the organization, about how they customized the design sprint for company use. Here’s what we learned based on their “Home Depot-izing” of the design sprint.
Don’t be afraid to customize the phases
A traditional design sprint has five phases—understand, diverge, converge, build, and test—but depending on the organization or the problem it’s facing, that may be too many or too few.
By partnering with their user research team, Home Depot found they needed a deeper understanding of the necessary research inputs needed to accurately state the problem statement and the outputs.
Based on this learning, they added an additional pre-phase to the sprint and renamed the phases to fit their needs: understanding, investigation, ideation, focus, prototype, and validation.
[invTip title="5 design sprint questions I hear the most" thumbnail="https://s3.amazonaws.com/www-inside-design/uploads/2018/05/jake-knapp-sprint-workshop-featured.jpg" url="popular-design-sprint-questions" isPost /]
Make the timing fit your goals
A typical sprint is five days, with one day dedicated to each phase. At Home Depot, the team introduced three options: the typical five-day approach, plus a three-day approach and what they call “one-day problem framing.”
Creef detailed how that approach works for the team: “The one-day problem framing is when a product partner comes to us, and they potentially want to do some ideation around an idea or a hypothesis. Here there might not be any research, and so we don’t want to necessarily turn those partners away, but we want to make sure that we are protecting the integrity of the problem space. So for this, we just take the team through the first three phases.
At the end of the problem framing, we usually come out with anywhere from three to five sketches or wireframes that the team will then bring up in fidelity and test.”
“It’s gone over really well, and we’ve even gotten some additional ideation around roadmap prioritizations, as well as how can we add this to the research roadmap,” Creef said. “Let’s say you come out of a problem framing, and you determine that this is a very large problem space, then from there we can talk to our user partners about potentially getting on their roadmap to take a deeper dive into the problem space and potentially running another larger, deep-dive design sprint.”
Customize your outputs
Another key deliverable Home Depot implemented is a roadmap prioritization and a debrief deck, both deliverables prove the value of the sprint—and design sprints in general—to key stakeholders.
“We found that through our retros that we really wanted to make sure that we were delivering value to our product partners and really keeping them engaged, especially on prototyping day,” Creef said. “So we’ve asked our remaining design sprint team to really work on this debrief deck, while the designers are working on the prototyping. So what this does is this captures all of the findings, and then the solutioning all of the problem space solutioning and findings of any of the tier levels.”
The bottom line is that a design sprint is meant to be used as a framework, and like any other framework, it’s customizable to the company’s needs. Read more about design sprints in Enterprise Design Sprints on DesignBetter.Co.
The capital markets structure of today is firmly rooted in modus operandi that have existed for decades. Although technology has transformed how firms actually trade financial markets and manage their investments, the basic processes remain broadly unchanged
– particularly when it comes to raising capital.
However, this is all changing as the advent of tokenisation, fractional ownership and the creation of new secondary markets provides revolutionary new ways of leveraging the value of assets, raising funds and trading.
Yes, some of this has existed for short while in the crypto world with ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings), but only really with early adopters. As the technology behind all of this evolves and becomes adopted by the mainstream – as it surely will – significant
change and opportunity will come with it.
Asset tokenisation
Tokenising an asset basically means breaking it up into a number of parts, each with the same value and each linked to the underlying asset’s value. These tokens can then be traded and the ‘ownership’ and ‘value’ associated with each token transferred accordingly.
This kind of fractional ownership is nothing new – it’s basically the same as buying and selling shares in a company. But Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), like blockchain, has transformed how this can take place and extends the process to other types of
assets.
From a technical standpoint, tokenisation refers to the process of embedding enforceable rights linked to an underlying asset into a digital token on a blockchain, where its movements and authenticity can then be reliably and securely tracked and verified.
The rules that embed and enforce these rights for the asset are coded into the distributed ledger in the form of ‘smart contracts’ – reducing the need for teams of lawyers and reams of paperwork.
Moving something of value, whether it be a unit of Bitcoin or a unit representing ownership in an asset, is made safer, easier, cheaper and more frictionless by using technology like blockchain. The act of transferring an asset from seller to buyer is simplified.
Transactions on a distributed ledger lessen or remove the roles of the intermediaries historically used to facilitate the transaction. It reduces costs, increases transactional velocity and helps price discovery on assets that may have historically suffered
from liquidity discounts. Put simply, as an issuer, this technology should drive down the cost of capital and reduce liquidity discount.
Leveraging new asset classes
As well as revolutionising the way familiar financial assets are handled and traded, tokenisation opens the possibility of trading and leveraging the value of illiquid and hard to trade assets too.
A good example of this is in the world of art. Trading in works of art is notoriously difficult, and only really available to the privileged and wealthy few. What is more, intermediaries and galleries take hefty percentages, so it is an expensive activity
also. Tokenising a piece of art effectively democratises ownership and parcels it up into small enough chunks to make it available to many more people globally.
The Andy Warhol painting ‘14 Small Electric Chairs’ recently had 49% of its value tokenised and sold. People purchasing those tokens now own their own piece of this iconic painting, whilst the owner has realised a significant part of its value – although
retaining overall ownership. If the whole painting ever gets sold outright, the fractional owners would get their share of its value. In the meantime, tokens can be traded on a secondary market.
Another example is property. There are a number of firms setting up funds that take ownership of buildings – e.g. an apartment block or office building – and tokenise the asset. This allows investors to get direct exposure to say Manhattan real estate that
in normal circumstances would be difficult. They get to share in the rental income from the building and, once again, their capital is not tied up as tokens can be freely traded on a secondary market.
Raising capital
The process of raising capital can take advantage of this new paradigm too. Businesses who want to raise funds in the traditional world look to the likes of venture capital firms or IPOs (Initial Public Offerings) on stock exchanges. These methods can be
long, complex, drawn out affairs that can be very expensive. Issuing tokens as a way of raising capital reduces a lot of these costs and can be much quicker and more frictionless.
ICOs have been doing this for the last couple of years, but mainstream adoption has not really taken place as the pure utility nature of these tokens means they have no real intrinsic value – just a potential promise of some value at some point in the future.
Understandably this, along with the fact they are generally unregulated, has put many people off – particularly institutions who struggle with valuations – and created a rather tarnished reputation, as many of these schemes have failed to deliver.
STOs (Security Token Offerings) are the latest evolution in the crypto space and, by contrast, are tied to some underlying real-world asset – e.g. shares or revenue. They may still have a utility value too (e.g. a discount against the products or services
that the business offers) but they also have intrinsic value and so also generally fall under existing regulation. STOs are attractive to investment firms as well as fundraisers, as investing in them allows realisation of investment when required on the secondary
market. In contrast, traditional venture capital investments are often locked up for extended periods of time.
Key benefits of tokenisation
Revolutionise capital markets: The universe of assets that can be tokenised and represented by a digital smart contract will greatly expand as this technology matures. Royalty streams, IP claims, multi-asset underliers pointed to single
contracts, are all potential use cases. The routes to slice and dice all types of assets and capital raise are going to be transformed.
Bring down barriers: Appropriately permissioned smart contracts backed by different asset classes, issued by entities from different jurisdictions, will be able to be purchased on a global scale. The creation of a global investor pool in
this space will promote new and exciting competition for assets, improving pricing accuracy and the ability for investors to create diverse portfolios of assets more efficiently.
Regulatory efficiency: Assets issued on transparent and immutable ledgers, with regulatory permissions embedded in the token are an attractive proposition to regulators. Their ability to track flows, manipulation or fraud is improved with
less effort.
In conclusion
Understandably regulators do not want the maturation of this space to happen with no oversight, and the same securities laws that have been successfully applied to date can apply to security tokens. Smart contracts can take care of some regulatory functions,
such as AML/KYC verification, in real time, reducing the compliance cost and burden historically applied by third parties on buyer and seller.
A compliant digital asset exchange that lists and trades security tokens needs to have systems and processes that are constructed to perform to the high standards a regulator and institutions expect. It needs to have the internal compliance, risk and monitoring
all traditional regulated exchanges employ. Trade surveillance, AML/KYC of all exchange participants and segregation of customer assets are all essential building blocks to any legitimate venue.
The opportunity is huge for early adopters of tokenisation. In a World Economic Forum study, the majority of respondents believed that 10% of Global GDP would be on blockchains by 2024. The visionary businesses that see change coming and adapt to leverage
it are the ones that will truly benefit and succeed
(The author, Matthew Pollard, is a co-founder and CFO of Archax, an institutional digital asset exchange.)
from Finextra Research Headlines https://www.finextra.com/blogposting/16358/tokenised-assets-the-next-evolution-in-capital-markets?utm_medium=rss&utm_source=finextrafeed
With the age of big box stores waning, all those massive abandoned retail facilities could be transformed almost instantly into housing for the homeless using a variety of plug-and-play prefab elements. The research and development studio at KTGY Architecture + Planning in Los Angeles considers what we seem to need space for the most in cities – housing people who tend to fall through the cracks as the cost of living continues to increase – and builds entire complexes of supportive spaces and services within the empty shells of stores like Sears and JCPenney.
“Re-Habit” doesn’t get rid of retail altogether. It just makes the shopping portions of each building smaller, and places bedroom pods, restrooms, kitchens, dining halls, offices, job training rooms and other spaces behind them. Each Re-Habit store would be a community-supported thrift boutique benefiting the transitional housing program.
The main goal of the project is to be self-supporting, the creators explain, by providing training, employment and housing for residents, who rotate chores like working in the kitchen or keeping the dining hall clean. The large, flat roofs of big box stores are ideal for rooftop gardening, recreation and solar panels, and many have outdoor plaza areas that could accommodate small pop-up shops and food carts.
To demonstrate how it could work, KTGY used a typical 86,000-square-foot store (which would often be an “anchor store” in a shopping plaza) and created illustrations showing how it could be used. The firm designed modular led pot units that contain anywhere from 2 to 20 beds, easily slotting into the large, empty spaces. Additionally, the space could support 8 individual apartment units on an upper floor.
“From 2016 to 2017, the homeless population in the U.S. increased for the first time in seven years, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. In the U.S., 553,742 people were homeless in 2017. Housing programs are a meaningful contribution to addressing the homelessness crisis.”
“Living without a home not only endangers individuals’ health and safety, but is also a significant barrier to obtaining and keeping a means of employment. Shelter is a necessity for all, and providing housing is one way to ease suffering and support individuals seeking to break a cycle of poverty.”
Socialize, drink water, get more sleep, play music, exercise. It’s a better way to live.
8 min read
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
We all want to be smarter and healthier. Not surprisingly, a strong mind and a healthy body are fundamentally linked. Our mental processes can affect our physical state, and the reverse is also true.
Finding ways to build and support both our minds and our bodies is crucial to reaching our goals, and to increasing our overall happiness, success and feelings of well-being. But no one becomes smarter or healthier overnight. It takes time and genuine commitment.
Start working toward building a robust mind and body with these 13 daily challenges that will test your limits and push you to be your absolute best.
1. Increase brain plasticity by playing an instrument.
Research suggests that regularly playing a musical instrument changes the shape and power of the brain, and may improve cognitive skills. It has been shown to increase IQ by seven points in both children and adults. Learning to play an instrument increases the plasticity of the brain. Musicians’ brains are structurally and functionally different from those of non-musicians.
For instance, the parts of the brain that control motor skills, hearing, storing audio information and memory become larger and more active when a person learns how to play an instrument. Playing an instrument has also been shown to increase alertness and emotional perception.
Studies show that reading books, no matter the type, increases your language comprehension and vocabulary, and boosts brain activity. Reading has been shown to help you stay sharp, and reading fiction in particular has been linked to increased empathy, emotional intelligence and social support.
Research published in the Journal of the American Academy of Neurology found that people who engaged in mentally stimulating activities like reading experienced slower memory decline as they aged.
3. Untangle your mind by writing.
Like reading, writing encourages vocabulary growth, grammar and language skills, and use of proper syntax. But even more importantly, writing helps us untangle our messy minds and allows for clearer thinking. Writing helps us learn more by improving our ability to absorb information.
Our brains more effectively store information we write down, improving our recall and memory. Students who take notes longhand during class consistently score better on tests. Writing forces a person to pay attention to their memories, experiences and internal dialogues — a combination that increases brain function.
Studies consistently show that people who exercise regularly are healthier and have higher IQ scores. Exercise is an important part of maintaining a strong body and feeling energized. People who exercise regularly think more clearly and are better at coming up with new ideas.
Physical activity has been shown to affect the health of brain cells, the growth of new blood vessels in the brain and even the abundance of new brain cells. During vigorous exercise, a process called neurogenesis occurs, which increases the production of neurotransmitters. Exercise also causes the body to release dopamine, which is why active people generally have less stress, better concentration and more energy.
5. Socialize to increase intellectual performance.
There’s a good reason why socializing is such an important part of our lives — it turns out those friendly gatherings can actually increase our intellectual performance. Researchers believe that social interactions "exercise" our cognitive processes, so people who connect socially and mentally with others receive immediate intellectual boosts.
Those who engage in social interactions with others have higher levels of cognitive performance than those who don’t. The study found that people can reap these benefits from just 10 minutes of social interaction.
Staying hydrated is crucial to overall health. Drinking water is a natural pick-me-up, while dehydration leaves you depleted and tired. When your body has plenty of fluids, your heart will pump blood more efficiently through your body, delivering important oxygen and nutrients to all your cells.
Our brains also depend on proper hydration to function optimally. Dehydration disrupts the delicate balance required for brain cells to operate, causing your brain to function less efficiently. Dehydration can impair short-term memory function and long-term memory recall.
7. Harness the protégé effect to help you learn.
Learning by teaching goes back to ancient times, but modern researchers have discovered exactly why it works. It has to do with the “protégé effect,” in which students who teach their study material to others perform better on tests than those who learn for the sake of learning. Teaching improves your understanding, knowledge and retention of a subject. This is because it takes a greater comprehensive understanding of the material to teach it, and teaching the material increases your motivation to learn it.
While it’s nice if you can impart your knowledge to someone else, it’s not necessary. One technique is to simply pretend to explain material to someone — try explaining the subject out loud. The more you feel like you’re teaching, the more you will benefit from the protégé effect.
8. Make smart diet choices to support your body and mind.
Making smart food choices is not only good for your body; it can help stimulate your mind as well. The right foods will support your brain function, boosting your concentration and improving your learning. Eating a diet rich in nutrients and vitamins can help you feel more energized so you can focus.
Some of the best “superfoods” include blueberries, tomatoes, fish and whole grains. Coffee has been shown to increase alertness and improve mood, and turmeric has potent antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties.
9. Hone athletic skills for improved brain performance.
Practicing athletics isn’t just a good way to exercise your body; it’s actually a great way to improve your brain’s performance. Research has shown that children who are active in athletics typically do better in school and have a better chance of continuing their education after high school.
That’s because athletes are building their brains every time they have to make complicated decisions in a split second. Different types of athletics require you to master both conscious and unconscious decision making. Research shows that athletes’ actions are more than a set of automatic responses; they are part of a dynamic strategy to deal with an ever-changing mix of intricate challenges.
10. Sleep to help you remember.
In our rushed and busy world, it’s easy to overlook nature’s best (and absolutely free) cognitive enhancer: sleep. We all know sleep is crucial to helping us stay alert and focused. However, you should recognize that it’s also key to helping us learn new things. Research shows that sleep enhances our memories, and different phases of sleep consolidate different types of memory.
We know from recordings of brain activity that the patterns in which our neurons fire when we’re learning during the day are frequently replayed when we’re asleep. This is the brain’s way of rehearsing things it has learned throughout the day.
11. Learn a new language to increase problem-solving skills.
Knowing how to speak more than one language is increasingly important in our globalized world, but being bilingual also has the benefit of making you smarter. Learning another language has profound effects on your brain, improving cognitive skills that are unrelated to language.
People who are bilingual are better at solving mental puzzles. Research shows being bilingual improves the brain’s “executive function” — the command system for planning, solving problems and other mentally demanding tasks.
12. Break out of your comfort zone for maximized performance.
We all have a comfort zone. It’s our familiar routine, where we know what to anticipate and how to react. This state of relative comfort creates a steady level of performance — we function at a constant, even pace.
But maximizing our performance requires us to be in a state of “optimal anxiety,” which is just outside our comfort zone. Finding this state is a balancing act. Push it too far, and our distress skyrockets, causing our performance to drop off.
The trick is to break out of your comfort zone and push yourself to do things differently every day. Recalibrate your reality by trying something new, but not to the point where you’re on anxiety overload. Finding this sweet spot will help you increase your performance and enhance productivity, and will make it easier to brainstorm and harness your creativity.
13. Adopt a learning mind to broaden your knowledge.
Pushing your brain to learn new concepts can be an amazing workout for your mind. When you tackle a subject area you don’t know, you effectively stretch your brain and help it build new brain cells and increase pathways between them.
Focus on cultivating a curious mind by asking questions. Commit to becoming a lifelong learner. Expose yourself to different world views, be curious about different cultures, continue to take courses (either online or in person) and always seek to broaden your horizons. Continue to do all these things, and you will indeed grow smarter and healthier over time.
from Entrepreneur https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/322440
