Final Reflection
I am so lucky to have the chance to take this class. I took this course because one of my classmates told me that if you want to do something interesting, choose Design thinking, and indeed, as she said. When I took the first class of this semester, we were asked to form a circle to find out what was in the people’s bags next to me. At that time, I knew, ah, I like this course.
One of the reasons I love this class is that Kristine (our professor) brings many exciting activities to the class. For example, she asked us to use LEGO to build the thing as tall as possible, convert it into a fish, and finally turn it into a story based on what we built. In the process, I learned how to make a story and tell it compellingly. In addition to LEGO, drawing ten circles into something different, discussing with classmates how to develop a bag based on each person’s pain points, adapting someone else’s drawing, creating a story, etc. These activities in the class taught me how to make a product from the user’s view and how to create a better story to attract our audience.
It reminded me of the book I read in this class. One paragraph talked about a team that built a product for disabled people without inviting real disabled people but instead imagined they were disabled, which led them to mistakenly make many features they thought were “disable-friendly”. Even from the user’s point of view, the product should be made based on the targeted customers’ perspective, as we were asked to do in class. We interviewed 15 New Yorkers of different ages and jobs to find out what they thought about recycling.
About the thing we do in class, our team project is about changing the culture to make recycling a habit and make people aware of climate change’s recycling. We created an app, a video, and some interesting posters to encourage people to recycle to address these themes. Learning how to make the posters, Figma and video are fun and useful.
In my view, this course would be helpful for my future in different aspects. It is not only because I learned how to design a product but also how to make the product from an idea to reality. Kristine helped us break the whole process down into each lesson, step by step, with relevant reading and in-class activities to help us move forward. This was very useful to me. I learned to break down the problem or project, which enabled me to be more patient and organized to move forward, which I lacked. It was beneficial for me to pick out the valuable ones from the initial ideas to implement.
I would like to do more things about interviewing target users and making prototypes of my products in the future. As I state in Mural, One of the reasons I want to take this class is that I have so many ideas about different products and I hope someday it can come true. With the knowledge I learned in this class, I am familiar with implementing a product from scratch. In the future, I can go ahead and try to make the product I would like to make.
