DS4I — Reflecting on my Design Thinking Journey
Taking this design thinking course has been a really cool learning experience for me. Through readings, hands-on projects, and collaborating with the Lisbon Project, I gained many insights that will stick with me. I want to reflect on three key takeaways: 1) the importance of intentional, human-centred design, 2) challenging assumptions by listening to others’ experiences, and 3) the power of relationships.
My Three Key Takeaways
My first key takeaway is the immense importance of intentional, human-centred design: Solutions shape lives, so we must shape solutions deliberately. Many solutions out there are, by design, flawed, for example, the migration process. Likewise, some solutions are designed with good intentions, but they ultimately create more harm than good. This highlights how crucial it is to consider the potential harms and benefits of a solution early on in the design thinking process.
In that regard, the course taught me that prototyping and getting user feedback early on is an excellent way to prevent or at least minimize those flaws. Putting this learning insight into practice and prototyping our idea through our event additionally showed me one of my weaknesses (being a bit too “perfectionistic”) and reminded me that perfectionism hinders progress—it’s better to start small and refine later.
My second key takeaway is that one must challenge one’s assumptions by listening to others’ experiences. I found it incredibly interesting to work with the Lisbon Project and our consultant, Rafique, as they exposed me to so many new perspectives and experiences of life that I didn’t know about before. Even though I also travelled and lived in many different countries before, I never faced the struggle of arriving there without any support, money or opportunities. Therefore, it was really interesting for me to learn about their experiences and understand the struggles they are facing, as well as some of the root causes of their problems. Moreover, what especially struck me was to learn about how highly educated and skilled they are, as my previous assumption was the opposite. Hence, I understood how crucial it is to get out there and listen to the people who face a certain problem you want to solve to actually challenge your assumptions and tackle the root cause of the problem.
My third key takeaway is the power of relationships. Sometimes, I believe we get so caught up in “life” that we forget that relationships are everything — the relationships we have with ourselves and the people around us. Moreover, creating relationships does not always mean a lot of effort and time, but creating relationships like at our event can happen really easily and be so rewarding. They don’t necessarily have to be the deepest relationships but can only be for a fleeting moment to make oneself and the other person happy. In that regard, I believe our event was very successful; we created many relationships with our participants, had a lot of fun (especially while creating the interviews) and were able to create a safe space. On top of that, we also grew together as a team and got to know each other better, which I found really valuable.
In conclusion, I learned a lot during our course, and I believe we were able to have at least a small positive impact on some of the people who worked with us. It doesn’t always have to be a big impact, but the small things count as well. Maybe through our event we created new perspectives, hopes or just a relaxing evening that helped one of our attendees feel more comfortable in Portugal. Maybe someone learned a word in Portuguese or understood how much they missed meeting new and talking to other people. The course really taught me that everything you do, especially “by design”, has an impact, big or small.
