Reflection 4

Recalling everything I’ve done and learned in design thinking, I feel delighted to choose this course.
I’ve never started a project and worked through the entire procedure before: from scratches, ideation, reframing the problem, till finally coming up with a prototype. Although this project is only an abbreviated example of a real-life project, I still learned a lot from it. Most of the problems we’re trying to solve are all wicked problems, and there’s no one simple solution that could solve them all. I often found myself clueless when seeing those problems before, but this class provided tons of frameworks to break down those wicked problems.
While validating our ideas, one most important thing I learned is not to “fall in love” with my solution, which happened a lot but I never realized before. This realization made me reflect on all the processes before that could be considered problem-solving. Sometimes I probably did not analyze enough to target the actual problem behind the phenomenon. It usually fails. Because as I fell in love with my solution, the purpose instantly turned into proving my solution’s rationality instead. I learned that I must be patient enough, even suppressing my willingness to search for a solution, analyze every aspect and test them multiple times until I answer the question.
Another thing that I have changed a lot is that now I know how ‘human-centered design’ works. I was a chemical engineer before I went here, and all I had to do in the past was to provide solutions to a relatively straightforward target. However, human isn’t as predictive as machines and chemicals, and you never know their thoughts and reactions. The approaches to analyzing cases are more complex than I thought, and there’s often a huge difference between what you expected people to feel and what their real feelings are. I’ve learned a lot of ways on how I could find out solutions in this class. So at least for now, I no longer feel clueless about solving them. The essential point is to understand what people really want, not find the ultimate solution.
Taking this course does change my mindset in different aspects and provides me with more insights and opportunities that I haven’t considered before.