Thank you! #SteppingBack
After 12 thrilling weeks, with a lot of ups and downs, we have reached a sad good-bye. The reason why I chose this course, is because I want to become a product designer one day! I knew that taking a course called “Design Thinking & Social Innovation” can only assist this process of mine. When looking back to the class of Design-Thinking, the first thing that comes to my mind is the very first class. This was the first class that I took at NOVA SBE where the students were sitting at round tables facing each other, instead of the board. That was already a big surprise when entering the class. But it already showed me, that this will not be a “listen to the professor talk, and then write an exam about it” -class. I knew that this will be different. And sure enough; 30 minutes into the first session we were looking into the purses and wallets of our seat neighbors and interviewing them about their items inside of their wallets. Then we had the opportunity to design their ideal wallet with all these various items. Looking back to that session now, I realized that I interviewed my seat neighbor very differently to how I would have interviewed her with the knowledge of today. At that point I had not learned about the importance of ethnographic interviews and deep listening. It was more of a Q&A process, than an actual interview. However, that is one of the most important skills I learned during these past 12 weeks; an interview should be a conversation where trust is key with open-ended questions! Interviews also need to have a climax, and gradually (as well as naturally) come to a closing.
Over the course of this class, I also learned that even though teamwork can be challenging, it really helped me to grow as a person. A lot of the times in the past, I would experience a lot of anger and frustration, which I was not able to communicate. Even though the group work was still frustrating at times, I really tried to work on my communication skills. It is a lot more difficult than expected, but it helped me to work on my patience. Looking back, I would have wished that I would have let my guard down more often, and expressed my worries and insecurities about the project and our progress more openly with my team members as well as with the professors. I believe that would have helped not only me (to calm down), but it would have also allowed us as a team to look at things from a different perspective. A lot of times ideas felt forced, because it seemed like we were running out of time and just “needed” an idea and “had” to be creative. Forcing creativity is never a good idea!
My advice to myself at the beginning of the course would have been not getting 100% on the first try, does not mean you are failing! Keep going and learn from your mistakes!
I would say that taking the lead and managing the tasks and the team is one of my key strengths. I enjoy planning and making sure everyone is on the right track. However, I definitely need to work on being more patient and on my deep listening skills. And not just to listen to give an answer!
The final presentation was also a challenge in our team. We were overwhelmed with the fact that we were not allowed to use PowerPoint. It required us to not only be creative, but to also make sure everyone’s attention is with us during the 7 minutes of presentation. We wanted to make sure that everyone understands our idea, and we wanted to do it well! We first thought of implementing storytelling; as this was one of the key learnings during the course. After listening to the podcasts and reading about the major factors in storytelling, I felt that we would have been confident in combining our app idea with storytelling. However, we felt that it would have been difficult to make it interactive and include everyone into the presentation, when doing storytelling. We were aware that Clear Logic + Captivating Expressions are the key factors in an inspirational and active storytelling, but we wanted more than that! Thankfully, we were able to come up with several ways to not only be creative, but also interactive with the whole class. It became very clear that no matter how old we get, we all love games! :D
All in all, I really enjoyed this course and am very thankful to have had the chance to experience it. With my passion and drive to go into Product Design & Development, I believe that this course was able to contribute a lot to my future path. My major key take-aways are: “ambiguity needs to be embraced and can be a great asset to a huge success” and “be patient and never force creativity!”. My next steps in life are leading in the right direction. In less than three weeks, I will be part of a product design & development team at Cosnova and will hopefully be able to contribute to great projects with some of the skills that I learned during this course! I have learned that even though the work that I will be doing is in the cosmetic industry, which requires product design and development for cosmetics; the key learnings and skills remain the same.
Thank you, Anne-Laure and Iñes for taking us on this journey! It was a great pleasure, and I am very thankful for all the valuable things you have taught us. I wish you all the best for you future!
