Hyper Diary: Learning by doing

Now that we as a group have learned what design thinking is, it is expected from us to apply our learnings for a real brief. After ideation, prototyping, iterating and collaborating, I found that it is not a best practice per sé. Because in theory the design thinking method sounds foolproof, since it has such a wide scope. Even though this way of thinking has brought me new insights and ideas, I still think the best ideas came after this process and not during.

You could consider me an introvert when I’m in a new/big group. I need time and space to think. I need that to adapt and collect my thoughts so I can carefully construct what I’m trying to say.

So when the design thinking process is in full effect, we start creating ideas with some different techniques than I’m used to. We have time limits on our ideation, for every theme we reset our time limit and start blurting out ideas. Even though it was fun and created some really interesting ideas, we noticed that the ideas weren’t that strong or feasible. So we tried again, and again. We got so caught up in finding new ideas this way that there wasn’t really room or time to think of ideas in the old school way.

Needless to say that at some point we had so many ideas that time pressure started to play a big role as well. So we went from creating ideas, to picking the best ones from the ideation process. In short, we picked a few and were eventually left with one, that we still didn’t really like.

Indeed, we went into ideation again. (Eventually we came up with a good idea and everything worked out fine)

Even though this process might not have been as efficient as it was set out to be, I think in our next challenge we will manage our ideation and choosing process alot better. We wanted to make full use of everything we had learned and kind of got stuck on the learned concepts in a way that we didn’t allow ourselves to use other methods.

Now I can say that looking back on this experience, that we’ve not only learned the design thinking methods but by using them we have also learned the extent to which and when to use these methods. Before starting this process it is good to take a few things into account;

• Do you have introverts in your group who might feel this is not using their potential?
• The design thinking methods are not be all end all of idea generation. If it is not working right for you, don’t hesitate to try something else.
• Definitely take everyone’s input seriously, because even the ideas that don’t seem much can spark something brilliant.

I think these were the most important learnings about design thinking for me. On to the next module.

Patrick