Innovation is so crucial for the success of any company while successful innovations are difficult to create. Design thinking is a revolutionary designing methodology that attempts to inspire the essential factors of creativity, the ability to take an abstract idea. The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design Standard University defined the concept of “design thinking” a human-centered, prototype-driven process for innovation. Comparing to the original design that aims at designing the craft more visually appealing, design thinking focuses on user-centric. Design thinking requires the designers to prioritize the demand of users first and then consider the other important factors such as outlook and cost. Similar to what Neil Stevenson stresses is that design thinking starts with empathy. Meanwhile, design thinking isn’t one thing, but a bundle of mindsets.
More concretely, the structure of design thinking introduced by Dr. Weightman consists of four pillars, desirability, viability, feasibility, and responsibility. Designers should understand the desirability or the demand of users before worrying about the viability, feasibility, or responsibility of the project. Thus, designer should conduct as many ideas as possible at the start of designing process. Then, designers will create many low fidelity prototypes and test the viability and feasibility of their ideas. Finally, designers should consider the responsibility or the environmental influence that might be caused by their products.
This week, professor Sachdev invited two members from Designfor America and they gave us a presentation about design thinking. To help us embrace the idea of design thinking, guest speakers asked us to think about the problems faced by our grandparents or other senior people and conduct solutions to help seniors solve the problem. At the first stage, we came up with ideas such as Generation Connect( An app connects seniors and youth), Wrist band Stabilizer, Robot (Artificial Intelligent), Teaching Kindergartens, and keychain messenger. After considering the viability and feasibility of our idea, we selected Generation Connect as our optimal choice. When presenting the idea of Generation Connect, we displayed our storybook. Basically, seniors can help young people solve their problems through the platform Generation Connect. This platform can help seniors feel they are respected and needed by others. On the other hand, young people can get good advice from people who have already experienced similar problems.
Storybook:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0PlDuRzfAznYk8ycVgwZURuWGc/view?usp=sharing
Our team logo:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0PlDuRzfAznQ2RpeVM0czZZUzA/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0PlDuRzfAznNlVoMnlCZFBxUzg/view?usp=sharing
Hi Yuanzhen,
Great post, I particularly liked the innovative app that your group had created to allow seniors and youth to communicate. When I was younger I learned huge amounts from my grandparents, they had been learning and growing for so many decades and had so much wise knowledge and lessons for me to learn. Creating the app would be very useful for the target consumers of seniors who are looking to share their knowledge. In regards to your article, I too had spoken about design thinking being targeted to the consumer, though I liked how you had included that the organization needed to empathize with the consumers to create the correct product or service.