India is a wild place of stark contrast. People making a living as trash pickers sit outside the Grand Hayatt as Porches roll by. Roaming animals line the streets in view of sky scrapers. Temples built eons ago stand in the middle of a green island of peace surrounded by roads packed with ceaseless honking. Three Americans and a Kiwi run around going to middle class people’s homes to ask about how they bathe.
In my first year at RB, I spent a month in Delhi as part of an immersion project to live and work in India. Our task while there was to complete ethnographic research, brainstorm ideas, and test them in focus groups all in a four week window. This was an incredible experience for me. It was both excitingly new, and relentlessly taxing.
To organize logistics and a research strategy from overseas was quite a production. Not to mention we were dealing with some cultural unknowns. Pre-trip I was personally responsible for scouting out new low cost packaging from suppliers, and creating some prototypes as stimulus points in our interviews. Part of the research plan was to leave prototypes with interviewees for the week before we were there, so my prototypes were sent ahead of us to people’s home. 
Once there, we battled jet lag, traffic, and food poisoning all so we could speak to consumers and garner meaningful needs out of people. Besides participating in the twelve user interviews, downloads, brainstorms and concept creation, I also managed our digital media and shot and edited a snazzy video documenting our trip and explaining the team’s process.
Once we came home the team output a meaningful body of work in the form of a video, a book/deck of insights and product concepts, and moderated brainstorms. Overall it was a successful project that would lead to many more like it for the team.