MARGA

MARGA is an incubator to help design students get better capability enhancement and find jobs.

Holistic
STUDENTS INVOLVED
Xiwen Zhu
Yuhan Luo
Deepu James
ABOUT
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WHAT IS MARGA?

A one-stop platform to help design students get better capability enhancement and find jobs. We provided essential benefit for our main stakeholders. We give students sustainable growth. We give companies a talent-hunting path. Ultimately, we give universities complementary truth.

WHY MARGA

Here are our findings! We made the hierarchy of customers into two types of profiles. Type-A customers have practical project experience and clear direction for career development, only lacking specific knowledge. Type-B customers have less practical experience and no access to the industry. Even with abundant advice, they could not make a confident choice and they find it hard to take action, causing failure.After deep observation on type-B customers, we chose our target people who are experiencing the following 3 stages: Lost, Fearful, Being rejected. They are trapped in the confusion loop with bad experience.Now here's the question. How can we break the confusion loop for these people?Compared with type A person, we found that only with personal deep experience of the industry they can get some kind of superpower. To transform themselves from quantitative change to qualitative change, experience is the most important trigger.Trying it once is much more powerful than listening to tons of advice.

HOW TO ACHIEVE A DUPLICABLE BUSINESS MODE

So how can we develop the project scripts and make it a duplicable business mode? The answer is the academic rules of deconstructing projects. Each project is deconstructed into several stages according to different disciplinary features. It is made jointly by senior academic experts and enterprises. The following is the deconstruction rule for industrial design projects. It was co-created with a top Chinese industrial design company and two professors.The project content can be divided into two categories, direct-in content and permeating content. The former provides objective knowledge that users can apply directly, while the latter provides resources and channels to make users perceive deeply.Each detailed division is closely related to our design details of MARGA: specific design processes can be directly displayed through scripts, while others’ experiences can be shown via Warden Marga.

10+ MODULAR COMPONENTS

Each script is developed based on the rule in its discipline.We develop the interactive scripts which mainly have more than 10 components. They can be used modularly.Maybe you are curious about how we combine these modular components together to make scripts. Let us introduce an example. It is the project script for competitors analysis in terms of CMF at product-design field. We have a video lecture, text and a little quiz to provide theoretical knowledge. We have guidance of specific tools —— style quadrant diagram, with a good sample. We provide a slot for users to submit their own practice. Also, we have our Warden Marga to provide a peer situation, such as how long peers spend on it. Through these components, we can achieve in-depth teaching, from theory to understanding to real practice.

HOW TO EVALUATE IT?

We have deconstructed our MARGA into several elements for evaluation. We evaluated the understandability, the desirability and also the effectiveness of the project script. We tested whether users can understand what to do next by looking through the script guidance. For those stages where 70% of users were confused at the beginning, we divided them into several easier small tasks after testing. Finally, even for the most difficult parts, we gained the understandability of 100%. Also, we found that most of our users can find the projects they are interested in within 10 seconds. They said they are willing to pay around 30 pounds per year to enjoy our Marga service, which is enough to complete 10 projects on our platform. This shows our accuracy in pricing.

special thanks

Special Thanks to MOMA Industrial Design Company and Ningbo Industrial Design Society, and to all professors,experts and students participating in interviews or joining in the testing and prototyping part. Also, we would like to extend our thanks to our project tutor Jonny Jiang, who helped us a lot, with supporting and encouraging us all the time.

students involved on the project

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