SK Siddharth Karandikar
Brief

Leadership · COEP TU — design thinking project

Traffic police do not need better equipment. They need somewhere to put it.

Role
Interviewer, modeller and report author
When
Jan – May 2024
Team
Eight-person team
Full read
1 min

In short

User research with an on-duty officer reframed the problem, and the team designed and costed a portable workstation with a funding route.

We started with one officer and a structured interview about his actual routine. He was used to making do and reluctant to name his discomforts, so the interview walked through his day and confirmed each pain point with him afterwards. Empathy mapping moved the problem away from the obvious answer, better gear, toward the real constraint: an officer on duty has nowhere to work from for eight hours in the open.

Three ideation rounds were sorted with the four-categories method, which kept rational options apart from long shots. They converged on a portable workstation, prototyped against amenities, ergonomics and materials. We costed it per unit and identified CSR and police welfare funds as the route to paying for it, because a design with no payer is not finished.

In a team of eight, I ran the interview, modelled the workstation and wrote the report.

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