For the Mini-Bootcamp about Innovation & Design thinking we had in class, I partnered up with Jasmine to understand her needs as a Year 1 student in Professional Communications.
What I learned from the seminar was that ‘Design Thinking is a process for creative problem solving’ (Chorazy, E 2020). It is used to understand the needs of audiences by asking them directly as they know what they want best.
For the activity, Jasmine said that she feels that opportunities in studying for the course is lacking. She prefers hands-on activities over theory activities as she feels that she can understand and learn faster by being practical. It also helps with gaining experiences about what can be improved on for the future.
For theory activities, she said she enjoys it lesser as she does not know where or what can it apply to for future jobs. So, she feels that it is less efficient and slower compared to experiencing it on your own through hands-on projects.
From the initial interview, what I can was that Jasmine is an advocate for hands-on activities as it lets you experience it by doing it. She rather do than listen and write. This allows her to be engaged in the respective individual modules.
With these information came the ideation. I came up with 5 ideas. The first one is “out of 3 assignments, 1 will be hands-on” by doing so it allows her to experience the module, hands-on. The second one was to have a hands-on aspect to each assignment. Third was longer calendar period instead of “intensive” to ensure full understanding of modules. Fourth, after every theory-based assignment, do a reflection on how this could affect her life with hands-on application. Lastly, work-in-progress meetings for theory lessons so that she can gauge how she’s doing to make her modules more meaningful and engaging.
Jasmine gave insight and loved the 4th and 5th idea and gave her thoughts on what can be improved to make it better. So I refined it to best suit her needs.
The refined ideas were: after getting back results, there will be an “excursion” for that particular module to see what job opportunities are available after graduation. She gets to see first-hand, how her skills will be utilised in the future. For the other idea: if there is 10 lessons, she can book 3 work-in-progress consultations with the lecturer in a chilled setting so that she can ask about her progress and have a much more engaging school life.
After sharing the refined ideas with Jasmine, she said that these ideas would help make her school life better. So I believe that I was successful in the outcome of this mini-bootcamp as I understood the needs and wants of Jasmine.
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The Design-Thinking process was beneficial as it allowed me to set milestones to make sure the goal is achieved. If there were to be hiccups along the way, I can look back and see what I can reuse to progress the project forward. Having a design thinking mindset allows me to be more solution-focused and action-oriented as I can analyse the findings given and work on it with my imagination (Naiman, L, n.d.).
What I learned is that I need to understand what the audiences want and need. This would significantly help in making sure that my project is going in the right direction. Also, testing the prototypes on the audiences is important as they can give feedback that would be beneficial in improving the project idea. And if it doesn’t work, I can fall back on other ideas earlier to see what would work best again. ‘In an iterative process such as design thinking, the results generated are often used to redefine one or more further problems.’ (Dam, R F & Teo, Y S 2020)
For the future, I would definitely utilise this design thinking process when developing a new idea or solution. It will allow me to see what works and what does not work. With relevant information and prototypes made, I could refine ideas based on user experience to see what works to get the best final product.
Reference List
Dam, R F & Teo, Y S 2020, 5 Stages in the Design Thinking Process, interaction-design.org, viewed January 7 2020,
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/5-stages-in-the-design-thinking-process
Naiman, L, n.d., Design Thinking as a Strategy for Innovation, Creativity at Work, viewed January 7 2020,
https://www.creativityatwork.com/design-thinking-strategy-for-innovation/
Chorazy, E 2020, ‘COMM2733_2020_CLASS3 – Design Thinking & Research Insights_Seminar_Final’, PowerPoint slides, COMM2733, RMIT University, viewed on January 7 2020 https://rmit.instructure.com/courses/70338/files/10744644/download?wrap=1
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