By Chiranjivi Roka & Shojan Shrestha
We walked into lecturer Elif Öztekin’s masterclass on 1 October, we had only a rough idea of design and no clear expectations for the session.. We thought design thinking was mainly about designers and their methods and tools for their product, but we did not fully understand what it meant. Over two days, we learned that real work starts before anything is built by listening to people, understanding their problems, sharing ideas and testing solutions are what lead to meaningful innovation. We left with a new perspective, new ideas, and the confidence to approach problems differently.
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Day one: learning to listen
The first day was all about listening. We got to know each other by pairing up with people and then interviewed each other in pairs. Classmates spoke more openly than expected, and we heard their preferences. Later in the session, we clustered pain point of individual what we had heard into insights and turned them into personas, each built around a specific person’s pain point. Good design begins with human needs, and it felt true as we filled the wall with ideas that started from a real persona (Brown, 2009).
Our Moment: Building a persona and figuring out how we could ease their pain point in that situation.
Before you ask what to build, ask who it is for
Day two: from sticky notes to prototype
Ideas came next, and the first ones were rarely the best. Our wall filled with sticky notes that we combined, challenged, and refined into persona pain points. We created a technique that combines two unrelated ideas to spark new, unexpected insights through a semantic confrontation process to see what happens. Turning insights into “How might we…?” questions gave our ideas a direction. Our prototype was rough on purpose, because a rough model gave us honest feedback. ( Kelley, 2013), Call the courage to try, fail, and try again ” creative confidence.”
Presenting our idea
Presenting made the process feel real. Explaining our idea to others showed us which parts we truly understood, such as the persona’s situation, what they were dealing with at that moment, and how we could ease their pain point, and which parts we had only assumed.
Messy, and that is fine
We draw on (Richard Buchanan’s 1992) idea of wicked problems and accept that progress is a zig-zag line rather than a straight line. A method is a starting point to adapt, not a script. (Mark Stickdorn, 2011) describes service design as co-creation, and our table somehow roughly proved it. The best ideas appeared when different backgrounds read the same problem differently.
We did not become an expert in two days. We gained something we needed more about the perception of design thinking. the habit of listening before building, and the confidence to ask better questions and to act when the answer is unclear, which will help us in the real working world.
References
Kelley, D. and Kelley, T. (2013) Creative confidence: unleashing the creative potential within us all. New York: Crown Business.
Brown, Tim (2008) Design Thinking. Harvard Business Review
Buchanan, R. (1992) Wicked problems in design thinking. Design Issues.
Norman, D. A. 1. k. 2013. The design of everyday things. Revised and expanded edition. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Mark Stickdorn, (2011) This is service design thinking.
Figures
Some of images were created using ChatGPT, with some based on original photographs and screenshots from our Design Thinking workshop.
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