The idea for the Empact Meter was born during the Advanced Track Winter Term 2011/2012 at the School of Design Thinking, Hasso-Plattner-Institute, Potsdam.
We, a trans-disciplinary group made of four, were challenged to work on the question: How might we spot and shed light on outstanding Design-Thinking practices for the d.confestival participants?
During our research in the field of judge work and competitions, we found out that decisions about best practices and winners are usually made intuitively. Even if a judge has a certain set of objective criteria to choose from, they still make their choice based on their feelings.
Additionally to this insight, Design Thinking projects require a lot of empathy. Not only for the user but also especially for your team members.
So for us, the question was how to provide people involved in project based work with a tool that enables them to measure projects in an intuitive way?
This is how the Empact Meter was born. This intuitive tool allows not only juries but also team members, experts and other design thinkers to evaluate projects throughout simple and intuitive actions. The actions are based on five criteria: first impression, human centeredness, simplicity, power of idea and viability.
The App allows you to run through these different criteria in a playfully visualized manner, then interpretates the qualitative data and gives you in the end a measurable quantitative number.