Raspberry Pi- Creating Innovations when you are the Target Audience

Last week, we spent a lot of time discussing design thinking and human centered design methods. Both of these methods focus on really knowing your targeted consumer audience. The design toolkits were downloaded were full of tips on how to really grasp the experience of your target audience and learn what they truly needed from a product. The toolkits were full of flow charts, diagrams, and worksheets designed to help you squeeze the essence of the problem out your target audience. These are some of the methods that define human centered design and design thinking. What if, however, you were the target audience? How will this what benefits, changes, and challenges will this bring to a design thinking approach.

This is exactly the case for the developers of the Raspberry Pi, a credit card-size computer that retailed for around $35. Eben Upton, a co-founder of the Raspberry Pi, was having a beer one Friday with his colleagues at Cambridge University. They began lamenting that the quality and skills of the computer science students who had been apply for their computer science program had been declining.

Upton and his colleagues had begun their relationship with the field they loved as hobbyists. In their youth, they had rebuilt computers and taught themselves code from books. They realized that the easily programmable computers of their youth had been replaced with PCs and gaming consoles. The students coming into their program were as bright as ever, but they lacked this experience.

Over the course of many casual talks, Upton and his colleagues developed the super-cheap, easily programmable computer. Local business people joined the mix, and the Raspberry Pi was born. The computer has become wildly popular, with over 10 million units sold.

I’m fairly certain that many design thinking and human centered design principles could be seen throughout the development of the Raspberry Pi. There were likely many use scenarios, iterations, and prototypes for the Raspberry Pi created before the product we know today was born. I imagine, though, that one key element of design thinking was lacking from the Raspberry Pi development process – the inspiration process.

I doubt that the Raspberry Pi team spent much time conducting interviews to figure out what their customer base needed. The members of their team were the customer base. They already knew what their product needed to do. The example of the Raspberry Pi shows us the power of building innovations when you are the human at the center of the design. This idea also builds a strong case for working to empower those from disadvantaged backgrounds with the tools to build the own social innovations. No one is better equipped to understand the problems plaguing a community than those who are a part of it.