It’s been a while since I’ve gotten to engage my inner child and toy with playdough and pipe cleaners! This week’s workshop with Design for America gave us a chance to channel our creativity into solving problems and truly practice “design thinking,” as Tim Brown from IDEO conceptualized.

The theme for the workshop’s design activity was centered around the blind population in Austin, who were facing various challenges adapting to the rapidly urbanized environment. My group chose to focus on Jess, a college student at UT Austin who was excelling academically, but felt isolated from the campus social scene due to her blindness. We wanted to find a way to ensure that Jess felt safe and comfortable getting to and from football games on her own. We brainstormed all sorts of design ideas—from the most outlandish to the most obvious—and came up with an initial prototype for a smart walking stick that had GPS and paired with Bluetooth earphones. The walking stick could send GPS data to smartphones as well, in case Jess’s friends wanted to locate her, or in case Jess lost her walking stick somewhere.

While I enjoyed playing with the various art supplies and brainstorming, I think what really resonated with me was the process of empathizing. Quite often, problem solving is exclusively viewed as a highly analytical activity, and of course, that aspect is equally important. However, design thinking really emphasizes the importance of being able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, and I think that’s a skill that’s often overlooked or taken for granted in many fields. Speaking from my own experience of interning at a large bank last summer, I feel as though “having empathy” is often synonymous with showing weakness or lacking objectivity in parts of corporate America. However, when properly leveraged, I think it can provide keen insights about any user/client and can drive tremendous amounts of change in the positive direction.

We had the opportunity to present our prototypes and receive feedback, which is an incredibly important part of the design process. It was helpful to hear critique of our design, because it forced us to consider things we hadn’t thought about, like how the GPS feature in the walking stick might be redundant assuming Jess’s smartphone already has GPS. Nonetheless, I was proud of the amount of ideating we were able to do within an hour (early in the morning, that too.)

The students from DFA did a great job of relaying the importance of empathizing, failing, collaborating, and communicating—they were also quick to stress that the exercise we did in class was incomplete without real user feedback, which is the most important part of the design process. I felt really inspired after the workshop, and found some other resources on design thinking:

1. I’m always on the lookout for applications to the financial services industry, and I thought this article on how design thinking is impacting banking was really interesting: https://thefinancialbrand.com/70152/design-thinking-banking-financial-innovation/ 

2. Here is Elise Roy, a disability rights lawyer who happens to be deaf, herself—in her TED talk, she talks about how designing for disabilities often creates better outcomes for everyone.