Design Thinking: Final Reflection & Key Takeaways

Design thinking is a process used to understand why and how a problem can be solved by challenging assumptions and using strategies for the benefit of users of a product or service. It is a process that can be applied to any career or any situation an individual comes across. Through design thinking, I have personally learned to slow down in my thought processes; I started to ask myself, what is the purpose of my decision? Is it intentional or beneficial? I also had to take more time to consider other perspectives since I often make assumptions about others or think that they feel the same way that I do.

This is how I would define design thinking in a visual. The graphic was created in Canva by Irene Lu.

A branch of design thinking that is a bit more detailed and complex is systems thinking. Systems thinking is a web of different interactions that are used to help us understand the impact of our choices in a holistic view. Systems thinking guides us through how each decision that we make blends together, thus leading to a potential outcome or solution.

Systems thinking was used in this course throughout each stage of the design process. For example, during the brainstorming process of each topic that was introduced, each team had to use systems thinking to see how every theme was connected to each other non-linearly. The final project highlights how systems thinking was used during the ideation and brainstorming phase of work. The challenge was to solve food insecurity for individuals and families, and the first step each team needed to take to solve this issue was to combine knowledge of food insecurity and share common themes with everyone else on the team.

As seen above, everyone in Team 343 had different ideas and knowledge of food insecurity, but the topics all were related and interconnected with each other in some way, shape, or form. Systems thinking uses these different topics and combines them together to address the greater issue at hand, which is food insecurity.

After brainstorming and using systems thinking, design research should be used to gain more perspective on a topic. Design research is used to understand a target audience better by trying to process the demographics' needs and wants. Design research is important because it helps us pinpoint what area of a topic to focus on. Narrowing a topic down to processable chunks of information is important so that a problem isn’t too broad to solve.

Something that I learned in this process is that discarding assumptions and reframing questions in a way that is not leading the direction of a conversation or interaction is very difficult. A lot of thought needs to go into how someone approaches design research. I personally think that looking back and reflecting on your individual actions, thought processes, and changes are important to gain more understanding of what is the root of the cause.

Asking myself why throughout my decision processes helped me with checking my assumptions. Source: greetingideas.com

During ideation and solution exploring, I realized that cooperating with people with different opinions is quite difficult. Sharing a large number of different ideas and combining pieces of ideas that every team member liked helped us move past any disagreements. Rather than compromising, having effective conversations where we asked each other why we preferred one choice over another helped us create new ideas that would acknowledge everyone’s topic of preference. I also learned that sharing bad ideas is alright since many bad ideas helped us become more creative in our brainstorming process, thus leading to more creative good ideas.

As seen in the image, this was the board for potential solutions to prototype that were created during Team 343’s solution brainstorming phase. We had multiple different ideas, and only agreed on which solutions to try to prototype once we had deeper discussions about why we liked certain solution ideas. Understanding why helped us combine ideas to create a new solution to prototype that all of us equally liked.

Fieldwork also gave me a more realistic view of the feasibility of different potential directions to go towards with the solutions that we needed to test. Many individuals with no background or research on the topic were able to share their honest thoughts on food insecurity, and the entire team was able to combine knowledge and information to see if what we thought was important actually was important. Doing fieldwork helped me gain more understanding of the user needs (see my fieldwork notes to learn more about the information I gained during the fieldwork phase). Next time, I would probably aim to have a larger sample size of interviews since 9 interviewees across the entire team is still a relatively low number of people to talk to if we are trying to get an accurate representation of NYU students as a whole, which is over 50,000 students.

Prototyping and testing were quite difficult since it was so easy to fall back into the habit of making individual assumptions. Having a lot of rounds for prototype feedback was crucial since bringing on new perspectives and people without an attachment to the project/prototype helped me understand how others processed the project at hand. People that did not have background context or conduct desk research on the topic of food insecurity were able to give honest and valuable feedback (see prototype feedback section on Team 343’s Miro board), and it helped with improving features of the final prototype that was created.

Source: https://www.innovationtraining.org/design-thinking-mindsets/

A challenge that I faced in this course was to reframe my mindset when asking questions. At first, almost all of the questions that I came up with were leading questions, and discarding my own assumptions was a really difficult task. Working with a team helped keep me accountable since other members of the team were able to give me feedback when I unintentionally made assumptions.

A success that I had during the course was having a growth mindset. Previously, I preferred working on individual assignments, but collaborating with a team throughout the semester gave me more confidence in my approach to teamwork for future projects and assignments.

Collaboration has been a good tool to create novel ideas. While disagreements are bound to happen in any group setting, the value of collaboration is high since you are able to bounce your ideas off of others. Shared/combined ideas also seemed to have the most positive feedback when presented to peers in class. In the future, I would like to approach teamwork in a similar manner; I would want to have a recurring time to meet weekly and a document that lists out team goals and rules so that there is structure and tasks to accomplish by each meeting.

The image above describes how collaboration led to the best outcomes for Team 343. Source: Irene Lu created on Canva.

Something that has shifted in my thinking throughout this course is that design is just the visual aspects of a product or service. I never realized how much thought went behind the ideation, research, and testing phases before reaching the final product. Each decision in the design process is intentional, and design is making sure that all user needs are met and satisfied.

Lastly, my key takeaway from this course is that it is important to be aware of the nuances and decisions behind every single design decision. I often forget about how each aspect of a product or service was designed with a purpose in mind, but I tend to live my life in a bubble where I take many of the things that I have for granted. Thinking more about my own assumptions and the reasoning behind my daily choices in life will help me lead a more intentional and purposeful lifestyle.