Design Thinking Week
Design thinking is an important aspect of this post graduate, so important that the course is actually called Post Graduate in Design Thinking and Innovation. Jokes aside, understanding how design thinking works and can be utilized at its fullest potential is an absolute necessity in this course . Since the students are from various backgrounds, not limited to just the design industry, we were given a one week intensive workout to dive straight into design thinking with the help of Daniela Marzavan from DesignThinkers Group, Berlin.
After a quick theoretical introduction to the methodologies and a small exercise to design the perfect wallet, we were given the briefs we would be working on for the remainder of the week. From the three options given, team Bloom chose the brief — “ How might we help designers and business leaders create mutual empathy and communicate in a design vocabulary?”. At first the brief looked extremely challenging and vague, but the beauty of the design process is that trust in the methodologies helps in converging to a solution.
We started by understanding the problem at hand and compiling the possible stakeholders that could be involved with the given brief. With the help of the Stakeholder Map, we were able to identify and assess stakeholders with multiple levels of involvement. This then gave us a clearer picture for our next step, Trend Mapping. We did a quick brainstorm amongst the team to analyze trends that could/would affect our stakeholders. The trends, mapped at micro, macro, and mega levels combined with our stakeholders helped us decide whom to interview and what do ask them. Since we had a short time of 2 days for this project, we used our combined resources and energy and contacted relevant people from our own contacts to help us as well as interviewing random people on the Barcelona streets.
We discussed the interviews and found some interesting insights. As we were trying our best to utilize a diverge-converge approach, the insights helped us converge to a persona that would help us restructure our design challenge. Jordi/Jordina our hypothetical persona’s background, and personal pains and gains, made us empathise with him/her and restructure our brief to —
How might we help Jordi understand and work more efficiently with his creative team of the digital hub without the need to have a 3rd party / facilitator involved?
By including our persona in the problem question and by simplifying it, we ensured that we could reach a consensus and create solutions by the end of the week.
Our solutions involved facilitation of activities including games that could help in both parties, designers and business people, empathizing with each other’s methods of working. A few options were presented which were appreciated by the facilitators who gave important insights and feedback.
In the end it was a quick exercise which aided in instilling the design thinking ideology into our heads. Coupled with the book reading of Tim Brown’s Change by Design this workshop will surely help us implement design thinking in a better and more intuitive way into our project.
