Class Summary

This week’s class brought an important element to our understanding of 3D printing: design thinking. The people of Design for America helped me to understand the importance of knowing your user – in 3D printing and in problem-solving in general. This is a fundamental concept of business. Any strong business will be a solution to a problem. It should be no secret that the best way to solve any problem is to take on the perspective of those experiencing it. The solution must be designed for these people in order to be most effective. I experienced this lesson in full when we began the assumptions phase of our model solution for the visually impaired.

Building a Solution

When building a product for Jess to better navigate through large crowds (and lead a more typical independent college life), there were many details left unanswered. Is Jess completely blind? Are her other senses heightened? Is Jess used to her blindness? Without being able to interview Jess and discovering the answers to these questions,  we cannot build an adequate solution to her problem. If you make assumptions about the general population with evidence to support your claims, it can be easy to design a product that does not solve the user’s problem in the most effective way.

Ultimately, we made a model of an attachment device to a walking stick. The attachment would allow Jess to quickly send her location to friends, or send out a distress signal. I wish I had a photo of our model but I never took one.

In Class Readings

In our reading, Tim Brown discusses design thinking from a business perspective. We need to design effective products that address our customers needs better than any competition. The best way to grasp this, Brown writes, is through examining the pain points at a close level and prototyping solutions quickly to address them.

External Knowledge

https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/5-stages-in-the-design-thinking-process

I thought this was an interesting breakdown article of design thinking in which the author breaks down design thinking into 5 steps: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test. This is essentially a summary of everything I’ve written above. Design thinking is basically problem-solving. In order to solve a problem, we must start with understanding it from the perspective of the entity that the problem impacts. Then, after we observe, we define the problem. Then, we ideate solutions, build a model of what we think is the best initial solution, and respond to how our customer engages with it.

I thought this was an excellent video on design thinking by Airbnb. Airbnb took quite some time to take off from the time it launched. Much of its newfound success should be attributed to a deeper level of design thinking. I think you’ll find the video to be intriguing.