Overcoming the Fear of Failure through Design Thinking
Last September, I had the opportunity to attend an interactive comic workshop organized by DESIS. During the workshop, I met Beatriz for the first time and found myself feeling inspired and creatively reinvigorated. I shared how I had been feeling a lot of pressure to achieve good grades and how that had taken a toll on my creativity. Beatriz informed me about electives that might fit better with my background, one of them is Design Thinking for Social Innovation. As soon as I finished the workshop, I couldn’t wait to share my experience with my friends. Their response was surprising: they had no idea that Nova even offered creative workshops. I realized then how little we know about the different opportunities available to us at Nova.
But what main lesson did I actually learn in the last weeks?
In life, we all have moments that define our path and shape who we are. For me, one of those defining moments came when I enrolled in Design Thinking for Social Innovation. As I look back on the experience, I realize that I learned not only about design thinking but also about myself and how to refocus on my passions.
During the early weeks of the course, I was immediately confronted with the concept of failure and the necessity of letting go of initial ideas. For many of us, failure is a hard lesson to learn. However, as Bob Sutton writes in his article “Failure Sucks but Instructs,” it’s impossible to learn or do anything new without making mistakes. This is why early prototyping is so important, even if it means letting go of our initial ideas. As a perfectionist, this has been a challenge for me, but I’ve come to learn that dealing with disappointment is part of the process. In our group project, we also had to learn, that some designs might work better than others. In the end, I think we have to focus more on dealing with negative emotions, such as disappointment, that are related to failure.
In my journey through design thinking, I’ve also come to appreciate the value of collaboration and teamwork. One of the best examples of this was the Hands-on experience of using Lego ideas generation. By putting our ideas together, we were able to generate some of the best and most creative solutions. The diverse perspectives of all students, with different problem-solving approaches, also helped to create a well-rounded and innovative solution.
Another aspect of design thinking that pushed me out of my comfort zone was the team-building activities, such as Isaac Jumba’s workshop. At first, I was really afraid to solve the dancing task, but in the end, it was one of the most fun activities in the last semester! Despite being a challenging experience for me, being in a comfortable environment where I could describe my views, helped me to grow and to learn.
Throughout my design thinking journey, I’ve learned a lot about the different steps (also theoretical aspects) involved in the process. It has pushed me to adopt a mindset of creativity and innovation, encouraging me to think outside of the box and explore new possibilities. By working collaboratively with my team from different academic backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives, we were able to create a solution that was not only well-rounded but also innovative and impactful. Sometimes it still was a challenge to integrate all ideas, but I think it’s normal in the process.
One thing that really motivated us throughout the project was our shared desire to have a positive impact. We all believed in the importance of our project, reducing waste in Bairro Alto, and were driven by an intrinsic motivation to make a difference. This helped us to stay focused and dedicated, even when we were facing challenges and setbacks. As we approached the end of our project, we were all proud of what we had accomplished together. But we also knew that there was still more work to be done. We reached out to Superbock, to see if there are any opportunities to continue working on this project in the future. So it remains exciting if we can implement our awareness campaign in the future :)
While design thinking can be a challenging process, it is also a valuable one, that can help us grow and learn in unexpected ways. By embracing failure, collaboration, and teamwork, we can push ourselves to think creatively and come up with innovative solutions to complex problems.
All in all, I’m thankful for this experience and would highly recommend the Design Thinking for Social Innovation course to others, to gather new perspectives and eventually discover new interests and passions.
