Background
During December group, a group of Ashesi student teamed up with Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) on a project titled “Jamestown Challenge”. The aim of this project was to revamp Jamestown in order for the town to be recognized as a tourist site by UNESCO. The Ashesi team brought the design thinking skills to help create the most suitable solution for the project. However, from the beginning, the idea was to create a virtual reality application that would help tourists easily navigate Jamestown. This was an idea by MEST, who wished to work with the Ashesi Design Lab into bringing this solution to life.
Field Research
The Ashesi team divided into four groups, one for each of the four stakeholders identified to be critical to the process of building the solution. These included both local and international tourists, tour guides, taxi drivers, fishermen, and Local Jamestown People. The teams were tasked to carry out an ethnographic research, where they interviewed the above listed stakeholders. Some of the questions asked were how these stakeholders see Jamestown changing in 10 years, and what they wish should be there to create a good tourism experience.
Through interviews and observations conducted by Ashesi Team, there was a lot of information gathered which opened many more opportunities of problems that could be solved, to help maintain the history of Jamestown, and revamp Jamestown. After gathering information, the Ashesi Team underwent an ideation process, where they came up with different solutions specific to the stakeholders they interviewed.
The ideation process generated a variety of different ideas for solutions which we had not thought about from the beginning of the research. The MEST team were able to build the application using the information gathered from the research. However, the Ashesi team saw a lot of potential in this project and has decided to explore the other solutions that were generated. This then, led to the beginning of Jamestown Challenge as a project in Ashesi Design Lab.
Moving forward, the Ashesi team is now working towards bringing some of the solutions to life and impacting the Jamestown community through creating a way to protect the history. The Project is currently led by Lisa Princesse Ikirezi from class 2021 together with Percy Brown from class of 2022