SET POST 3: Design thinking

I learnt about the six stages of design thinking in today’s seminar. It ‘encourages organizations to focus on the people they’re creating for, which leads to better products, services, and internal processes’ (IDEO U, n.d). Using my knowledge of the design thinking process, I created a solution to improve my classmate Ryan’s experience as a first-year Professional Communications student. The first step was to empathise with Ryan’s wants/needs. Through the interaction with Ryan, I observed that he has a laidback approach to life and has a cheerful disposition. He enjoys school because of the new friends he made but he expressed one concern of his – punctuality. He is constantly late for class and is worried that this would become a habit. Hence, I came up with a problem statement. As a first year professional comms student at RMIT/SIM, Ryan needs a way to be more punctual for classes. Interestingly, in their experience, he attributes his lateness to the attendance system. SIM’s attendance system has a grace period of one hour and Ryan feels this is the reason why he is taking punctuality so lightly – compared to when he was always on time for classes in his polytechnic years. I came up with a few ideas and felt that the most feasible one would be to implement a demerit point system where demerit points are given to a student if they are late to class three times a week, and a certain number of demerit points would result in the lowering of the student’s final grade.

The challenge was that I had to come up with as many ideas and a solution within a short period of time. I am someone who needs to be organised in my thought process, which can take awhile. Hence the limited time made my thoughts slightly disorganised which I felt made my ideas and solutions of lesser quality. However, it was easy to define the problem as I have been Ryan’s classmate for around six months and after observing his behaviour for a period of time, I think that the biggest problem he has as a first-year is being late for class.

Due to the time limit, I did not manage to hear his feedback entirely. I feel that this solution could be better if I had more time to listen to his insights on the demerit point system.

For future design thinking processes, I would want to ‘generate a holistic and empathetic understanding of the problems that people face’ (Rikkes and Teo, 2020). This is the first and most important step of design thinking, and to create a good solution I would have to be more sensitive to the problems users might face.

IDEO U, n.d. What is Design Thinking?, IDEOU.com, viewed 18 February 2020, <https://www.ideou.com/blogs/inspiration/what-is-design-thinking>

Rikkes, F.D., and Teo, Y.S., 2020. What is Design Thinking and Why Is It So Popular?, Interaction Design Foundation, viewed 18 February 2020, <https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/what-is-design-thinking-and-why-is-it-so-popular>