Final Reflection

The idea synthesis and visualization, problem framing, and journey maps improve my creativity and critical thinking skills. With the mass of information we gained from the interview, I am able to find key insights and classify various information based on categories such as feelings and challenges. I have learned a lot of ways to overcome language barriers from interviewees, but found it hard to summarize everyone’s ideas. The insights clustering activities were extremely helpful as they helped me to finalize conclusions and communicate insights with team members. In this way, I found two key solutions from a huge amount of information: translation software and cultural activities. The abductive thinking skill plays a major role in design and idea synthesis because it generates hypotheses based on ambiguous data, and embracing ambiguity and uncertainty in design is important since it helps me uncover unexpected insights. The “IST” problem-framing activities provide me with new ways to solve problems and identify the needs. The purpose can be clarified and enable me to identify the root cause of each problem. In addition, I have gained a comprehensive understanding of the process and workflows when solving problems or doing tasks by using journey maps. When visually placing the steps in sequence, I can identify important touch points and understand the needs, goals, and emotions during each stage. This technique is extremely helpful when planning a project. For our project to create a discord server to help international students overcome language barriers, the process of synthesizing ideas, creating visualization, and mapping out journey are extremely helpful to understand user’s interactions, emotions, and pain points, which helps us identify areas to improve.

My future endeavor is to work as a product or project manager. The ideas are crucial in project management workflows that require planning and organization. I will be able to adept at managing projects and visualizing and analyzing internal processes within organizations. When conducting research in the future, journey maps offer a structured framework to understand each critical step. It helps me to be more logical and enables me to handle a lot of information to find the most important one. By connecting disparate ideas and analyzing mass information, I am able to think outside of the box and generate innovative solutions. I want to explore more idea synthesis and visualization because I often get overwhelmed when there are too many ideas in my mind, by applying the visualization technique, I will be able to handle large amounts of tasks and information. Visualized “thinking” is more conducive to understanding and memory, and therefore can effectively improve the efficiency of information processing and transmission.