Disruptive Design Thinking, Starting from a Reverse Assumption Workshop
Team Panacea is now at a critical stage of transitioning from research into design. We have been sailing smoothly, but the waves of uncertainty are catching up -
Are we thinking creatively?
Are we reframing our challenges?
How can we achieve a new design that is truly innovative, instead of a redesign that only brings incremental changes?
To face these questions head on, we conducted a “Reverse Assumption Workshop”, which helped us be more creative, innovative, and gain a deeper understanding in how to utilize our research findings to inform our design.
A Shortcut to Tacit Knowledge
Following the principle of User-Centered Design, it is a standard to draw synthesized insights among individual pieces of facts uncovered from users’ experiences and the problem space. It is a tacit process, an intuition, a thing that we as humans naturally do — looking for patterns and meaning from the environment around us. While designing, the skill of reaching tacit knowledge can be sharpened through training and practice. An experienced and skilled designer can see through the surface of facts, and juxtapose them with each other in order to tell a coherent and insightful story to inform their design. Luckily, for young designers in training like us who don’t have enough experience and trainings in this process, there are other workarounds to achieve these insights — methods and techniques that can help us uncover tacit knowledge.
In this post, we are introducing a technique adopted by Team Panacea — Reverse Assumptions. It is a technique that encourages designers to revisit existing assumptions casted on the problem space, and devise solutions in a hypothetical situation where those assumptions are reversed or do not exist. By intentionally altering our perceptions on the problem space, this technique encourages designers to come up with different approaches which can normally be ignored or overlooked because of certain compelling constraints that are assumed to be true. It is an exercise that can provoke new ideas, and help novice designers sharpen our skills of tacit and creative thinking.
A more concrete example in the industry is Uber, who challenged the assumption that rideshare vehicles belong to the company providing the services, such as traditional taxi companies. By revisiting and reversing this assumption, Uber invented a brand new peer economy model, where individuals can provide rideshare services using their own vehicles. Team Panacea decided to give this technique a try, so that we can force ourselves to think out of the box, and to think innovatively.
Reverse Assumption Workshop
On a delightful Friday morning, the team gathered together and held a two-hour design workshop that was dedicated to our reverse assumption exercise. Drawing from our own understanding on all our research findings, we each came up with as many assumptions as possible in a time-box of 15 minutes. We then shared our assumptions and clustered them so that we had a list of distinct assumptions from the team. Some example assumptions are:
With the list of assumptions posted on the whiteboard, we then worked as a team, went over those assumptions one by one, and came up with a statement reversing the assumption of discussion.
Immediately following the reversal, we came up with design ideas for the reversed assumptions, which resulted in a collection of new ideas ranging from surprisingly practical to absurd.
It was a fun hour spent coming up with rapid fire ideas, without overthinking about the validity of supporting evidence. We discussed all the new assumptions and ideas brought up — we laughed at the ones that were ridiculous and impractical; we were also amazed by those practical ideas, since we would never have thought about them without intentionally questioning the assumptions we secretly held onto.
We then voted on the three most interesting ideas that can potentially bring a huge impact into patients and caregivers’ lives. In a timebox of 15 minutes, we each prototyped solutions for all three ideas, and shared them among the team. In this quick parallel prototyping session, we were able to express our own thoughts, build rapport, and develop each other’s ideas. In the end, we documented the top features that surfaced from the 15 prototypes we created individually, which would inform our next step in the design phase.
What we’ve learned
As human beings, our brains are optimized to process information in a way that is the most efficient and effective. We are constantly learning new things about the world, and forming assumptions from experience, knowledge, and beliefs. In the process of design, these assumptions are useful in quickly setting constraints and scoping out our challenge. However, in order to truly innovate, we need to be able to revisit these underlying assumptions, common sense, and conventions. We need to intentionally question them, which might be terrifying and uncomfortable, since we are essentially tearing down the world that we used to be so familiar with. The truth is, we are not designing for the present, nor the past, but we are designing for the future, a better and preferred future with delightful experiences. And those assumptions we are currently holding onto, might not necessarily pertain in the future, right?
Through this practice, we intentionally revisited our research findings and reframed our challenge. We gained a new understanding on our past knowledge, and discovered brand new design directions that can potentially be adopted in the upcoming design phase. Team Panacea is proud of our effort of challenging the knowns, and proactively approaching the unknowns. We are ready to take the leap from research to design, in a grounded yet disruptive manner.
About this PublicationWe’re writing the MHCI 2019 Capstone: Team Panacea Publication for a couple of reasons.First, we want to give you an exclusive behind-the-scenes tour of our capstone experience: the successes, failures, thoughts, insights, and innovations.Second, we would love to engage with you around the healthcare domain (Pittsburgh’s #1 industry!), so please follow / clap👏👏👏 / comment / share /reach out to us — we’d love to hear your thoughts
