Reflection of Design Thinking

Last week we finished our group’s final presentation. In the course design thinking, I learned a lot about innovation, creativity, and teamwork.

In the team project, I learn the whole process of how to define a real-life problem and methods to find out the practical solution. In the beginning, our team defined the stress problem among students while they are having tests. After a series of discussions, we decided to change the original problem, the stress of having tests, to the stress of graduating because we think the stress of graduating is more critical and needs to be solved.

In order to know more about the stress problem, we are assigned to take interviews. I learned that the interview questions need to be open rather than the answers of yes or no. The interviewer needs to be objective that I can’t guide the volunteers to give the answers I wanted. During the process of designing a prototype, my team members and I learned to brainstorm. Through brainstorming, we analyzed the many different aspects of the problem including family, job, mental health, heavy task, and emotions.

The comprehensiveness of our thinking gave our ideas to having practical solutions. We decided to develop a diary app where stressful graduating students can write down their thoughts to release their stress. Other than this, we tested our prototype and saw if our app works. The volunteers commented the app does help reduce stress and that we could add a social media function to the app. Based on the comments, we upgraded our app and tested it again. The final version prototype meets our requirements.

This project is the main line of the Design Thinking course. However, there are many branches in this course which are also very important and helpful for my future career. For example, I learned how to give an effective presentation. When I am giving a presentation, I need to make eyes contact with my audiences so that the audiences can focus on me. What’s more, I learned how to do storytelling and pitching ideas. The process of defining the problem, doing desk research, finding a solution, making a prototype, polish the prototype are valuable to me. I think I am more powerful after having this course and the precious experience would give me significant help in the future.