The Importance of “The Fuzzy Front End” in Design

A blog post by Alex Hochhalter

“Fuzzy Front End” by MTHEELEN

One design term I learned was "the fuzzy front end." It's basically the ideation process and time period. From my understanding, it's brainstorming, getting all the ideas in one place, figuring out the vision, and finding which goals you want to achieve with your process. Like one big rough draft of the entire project. 

Something that I learned about Digital Equity advocacy in Washington State is how many groups of people are working very hard at this. I never knew that digital equity was a thing before taking this class, and it has opened my eyes to some very important and hardworking groups and companies working toward projects to help bridge the digital divide.

A project that particularly stood out to me this quarter was the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP). I was able to interview someone who actually worked on this project, which made me realize how much ideation there had to be. In every project there is “the fuzzy front end”, and it had to take many processes of ideation and feedback to create a sustainable program for families to obtain access to internet or computers.