Learning Design thinking through an immersive curated personal experience
A personal account of the design processes learnt in the MIT Media Lab Design Innovation Workshop in the winters of Jan, 2015.
It was when I was talking on phone with a friend and my college senior Rishabh Sardana, sharing my experiences of my machine learning internship at IIT B, discussing tech, innovation and what to do next. He told me to have a look at a workshop that happens in Dec-Jan, every year, conducted by MIT Media Lab, with a remark:
This workshop would change your life. It changed mine, it will change yours as well.
Though I never was skeptical of the scope of exposure I would get by this experience, with the repute of Media Lab and the projects that emerge out of the lab. I perceived the experience is going to be more tech-oriented and gadgets-savvy.
With nearly missing the workshop as I missed my train, I finally reached at PDPU, Ahmadabad, Gujarat with amazing 300 folks with 50 mentors comprising of engineers, designers, scientists, architects, entrepreneurs, educators and activists, divided into 10 themed tracks. A perfect blend of Hackers, Hustlers and Hipsters.
I always wondered why the name ‘Design Innovation Workshop’. Design for me prior to this experience was something that is visual, or artistic, kinda like ornamental. But little did I know, it’s far more deeper than that. Design is a way of understanding the problem, the people and the context together. Its a way for bringing out innovation, and way of dealing with situations in general.
1. Team Building
The foremost and the most critical process we underwent was forming a team and getting to know each other. In the seven day workshop, it seems that we, participants know each other so well for long.
All the 30 members were divided in 5 groups consisting of 4–6 members each. Each group was asked to list down their Hardware | Software | Design skills and experience on a sheet and discuss it 1-on-one with their Team. Team Name and Team Motto.
2. Field Trips
We went on a field trip to attend a Light and Laser Show at the Akshardham Temple in Ahmadabad to better understand the theme: Synchronous Tools. (cameras, mobile phones were not allowed inside the temple campus, hence no snaps :/ )
The only instruction that our mentors, Jonathan Bobrow and Tomer Weller gave us was:
- Observe activities, people, structures
- Take (mental) notes
After the field trip, we were asked to discuss what we observed. Each team, one by one.
The common principles were circled out and these were the fundamentals motivations that were very core to our stakeholder, in this case: the Akshardham Temple.
3. Brainstorming
The sub-groups were now brainstorming, on different ideas and projects that are relevant to the theme: Synchronous Tools. Ideas and imaginations could run wild. The purpose is to diverge with as many ideas/features as possible.
4. Scenarios
From diverging Ideas, it was then to narrow down them. Selecting and working out with the 3 best ideas/project proposals to continue with on making Scenarios for them.
Scenario is a storyline how an user would be traversing the journey while using the product. It has a story, character, and use cases: how an user will use it.
This was followed by choosing the best among the three scenarios from among the team, either by vote, or mutual consent.
Hexagon Model: How to make Innovative Products
Many of teams, had a common issue of finding their idea already existing somewhere or very similar ideas over the Internet. We were introduced to the Hexagon model that proved to be very helpful to come up with new features as well as pivot the product accordingly.
5. Tools and Technologies
On the fifth day we were introduced to the tools and technology available, including Tessel, Node.js, Processing to incorporate in our projects.
6. Rapid Prototyping
Work, work, work ! Starting with the low fidelity prototyping by using paper prototypes to build websites, cardboard to build hardware demos. Taking feedback-reiterating and then proceeding to high fidelity prototyping using 3D-printers, laser cutters, CNCs etc
7. Demo Day
Design is Brainstorm-Prototype-Storytell. Now came the time to storytell.
Additional observations:
*Documentation is really core to the entire design process, and to basically anything in general. Documentation could be either on instagram, facebook, twitter, github, medium, anything that’s help in saving and getting feedback from the community. Tomer, one of our mentors shared:
the best result of your documentation is when someone uses it and is able to build the better version of it.
** Human-centered design is about the context, the people who would get impacted by it. Its about following the bottom-up approach and reiterating the product or service to deliver values to the end-users. In the words of Jonathan,
If you build something that delivers value to your end-users, you can build a business out of it.
Openness and collaboration were the very basic principles that I was able to learn out of this experience which led to the very foundation of the knowledge sharing community of innovators Flow.
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