An artistic picture of our improving distracted driving interview results.

This week our class participated in a design thinking workshop put on by leaders of the Design for America club here at UIUC.   I’ve participated in a number of design thinking workshops in the past; once in my User Oriented Collaborative Design class, once through the Social Entrepreneurship Club on Semester at Sea, and once through the web design course I took at Designation.

Since I’ve already done it so many times, you might think I’m a design thinking workshopped out, however, I am far from it. It’s always useful (and fun) to have a refresher on design thinking, because I feel like each group I’ve done it with has approached it differently and taught me something new about the topic. This isn’t just because they have each applied design thinking to a different topic (in this case it was how we can improve the driving experience), but also because they all have used slightly different techniques and processes to get to the final solution. In this case, for example, we used “How Can We?”, a fill in the blank exercise kind of like Mad Libs to come up with problem statements to base our final prototype around. We also did a funny little exercise called “What’s in the Box” and a speed prototyping exercise where we had to come up with a prototype for the solution to another more goofy problem that we came up with by pulling design cards from a pile (our class pulled cards to make the problem how to help Girl Scouts at a playground fly) to “warm up” for the brainstorming and prototyping parts of the class. I thought this was particularly helpful in making me feel safe to bring up crazier ideas around my team and in preparing some of my classmates who had never gone through a process like this before for what was in store for them.

These games made it a lot easier for the student who might feel like they’re not creative or not really designers feel comfortable and excited about the design process, and I’m definitely going to suggest using them in any design thinking process I might be involved in in the future. I’m very glad we had a chance to learn more about design thinking in this class, because there is definitely a huge connection between solving problems on a personal level and the using the tools we are learning about in this class to make things. Being able to create products that are customized for personal use and considering a future where creating and developing products customized to individual needs is a lot more prevalent means design thinking is just going to become more and more important. I’m happy that we were able to spend a whole class on the topic and am looking forward to being able to bring up some of the concepts with the students I work on future projects with throughout this semester as well as seeing how my classmates apply design thinking in their individual work.