Hyper Diary: My first week Design Thinking

Design thinking sounds very sexy. It gives the impression that you are aesthetically and intellectually brilliant, even though you don’t have to be. although it has this sexy ring to it, I still had a hard time explaining it to my friends and family. So when my first week in design thinking started at Hyper Island, I got the feeling I got further away from understanding what it meant. This was because there were a lot of explanations and most of them were not quite capturing it’s essence. Until I came across this:

“The essential ability to combine empathy, creativity and rationality to meet user needs and drive business success”

When I read this sentence, I had a more clear idea about what I was doing and at the same time could make use of my learnings more consciously. So during our briefing, our exercises and research I used these factors simultaneously instead of sequentially. The funny thing is, is that I thought I had the empathy thing down after 4 years of psychology. I do, in a sense, but I found there are more ways to implement empathy, to spark creativity and to challenge rationality.

It’s a short story, but so far it has been a short journey. The stories will become longer when this journey progresses, because it takes some time to get my writing juices flowing.

Patrick Oberstadt