Insights about the Design Thinking for Social Innovation Class
When I saw this course in the list of electives the students could choose from, I initially thought that it would be a computer design class, to create objects for example. This is a topic I have always been interested in, I planned to learn more about the Adobe Creative Cloud, creating innovative objects. however, the class was not quite what I had imagined.
What I really appreciated about this class was that I believe I learned more soft skills than hard skills, which is not often the case in university courses. Typically, you learn soft skills when working in the field, making mistakes, and having to understand and correct them.
There are many key highlights I take away from this class. However, the most important thing I learned was how to be efficient in teamwork. I noticed the importance of taking advantage of people’s different backgrounds, cultures, and knowledge to develop innovative ideas to solve problems that matter. This allowed many different ideas to emerge, with different points of view, which was enriching. This leads to the importance of genuinely listening to each other in the group and making sure that everyone feels good and confident enough to speak their mind and share their ideas.
For example with the exercise where we had to find a way to make a wise use of the empty space under the bridge, I noticed how everyone had different ideas in mind from mine, and emphasized different things they thought were significant, whereas other team members had not even thought about them.
Furthermore, when comparing the bridges of the different teams, I noticed the difference in everyone’s perspective of the situation and it was very insightful.
Something that helped me for the final group project was talking with people outside of the project. It helped me gain different insights, get questioned about things I did not think about in the first place, and that could have a huge impact on the final result.
The fact that this situation of “ignorance” for certain things arises on several occasions made me question myself enormously on our way of thinking individually. We are raised and evolve with people who mostly think the same way as us, share the same values, and have experienced kind of the same things as we did.
Therefore, we tend to have confirming bias because the people surrounding us share the same beliefs and perceptions about different topics. But in the end, it is not the truth.
This is why it is so important to get out of our comfort zone and discuss a lot with many different people to get the big picture out of a situation, take off our blinders, and get out of our limiting beliefs.
Additionally, when in March, the lecturer came to give us tips and advice for prototyping, I clearly understood the importance of testing things in real life but most of all, with the same circumstances it was going to be used for its final use.
He gave us an example with the Ipads that were tested in the dark, inside a room, but for which the final use was outside, during the day, and under 40 degrees. This leaded to a non-successful project because the testing was not appropriate. This also happened to a lot of teams when trying to improve their fighting dog, and it did not work out in the end.
When you test things in real life and under similar circumstances, unexpected problems arise, and the testing leads to failures that you can correct after. In conclusion, the importance of the context of the final use of the project and asking a lot of questions has significant impact on the well-being of the final object.
Moreover, when prototyping with Lego’s, we had a lot of constraints because of their shape, but it was still possible to be very creative and try to express ourselves in a tangible way. When looking for a solution, innovation to solve a problem, we must try many different things, re-frame, re-shape and fail before it works and before finding the right idea.
The last thing that appealed to me was also how urgency helped my group to find a solution and finally come up with a real innovative and possible concept/ workshop for our problematic. We were really struggling to find something that could help people because we were putting the barriers too high and really wanted to have a very strong impact for people in need. Every idea we had was very dependent from other institutions which made it very complicated for us to go on with the project.
However sometimes even simpler and smaller gestures are more effective.
In general, I would say that I was very surprised with this class, it taught me way more things than I expected and things that I believe are now integrated into my way of working in groups and thinking and that I will use in the future.
