Instructions: Reflect on your engagement with d.studio concepts, techniques and readings. Share your personal learning evolution over the past 10 weeks. Clearly communicate in your post and add links and/or rich media to support your prose.

Before the 10 weeks in Design Studio, I have little knowledge about the power of design and how it integrates into our lives. However, I have always been interested in design and have little idea on where to start. I am glad I enrolled in design studio.

Throughout the 10 weeks, our class have touched on topics such as the creativity, six thinking hats, business model canvas. It provided me a comprehensive understanding from the theory to the application of design.

One of the most interesting concept that we applied repeatedly is prototyping. In class, we learn that we should research and observe before we move on to the prototype. However, in design studio, I learn that sometimes it is better to just let your hands do the work and see what happens afterwards. Prototyping can be just base on your intuition and what you think it’s right. More often than not, I learn significantly faster when I prototype than thinking in my head.

The best example is the prototyping exercise we had against rain. We decided that we want to protect street food from rain. While our teammates all have good ideas on how to do it, the best way to prove our concept is simply make it happen. When we use Lego to build the bracelet to keep the shelter standing on our wrist, we realize that it is physically too heavy. There is too much excess material we don’t need. It doesn’t hold up properly. This inspired of us another way to build the same product: we don’t need a bracelet to hold  the shield. When we are holding, for example, the hot dog in our hands, we can implement the rain shield in to something that we can just flip open and hold it in our hands without much disruption to eating.

This inspiration significantly reduced the amount of cost associated with building the product, less material and less time consumed.

Further more, the two hands-on project provided me valuable experience in the future. I was able to use Business Model Canvas on an existing business and being able to bring some creative thinking strategy to make businesses greener and more sustainable. This is particular obvious when we are doing Pacific Arbour case.

When we are visiting the chef, we realize that he has a kitchen with the latest and greatest equipment to save energy and cost. We also noticed Pacific Arbour did a lot of work in making their business greener. Many times we ran into dead ends and believe there isn’t any recommendation we can make to further improve their business. We could have stopped there and give up. However, holding ourselves from jumping into the conclusion of failure. We dig deeper into our findings and notice that there are opportunities to communicate across different residences. This is a major change on how to build residences. Many people think that residence is a stand alone structure all by itself. However, given Pacific Arbour’s plan to grow and expand in BC, it is extremely benefit to use this network to improve their processes and provide a more congruent retirement residence experience.

There are many things I learn in design studio: from teamwork to individual thinking process, from business models to actual implementation. These are only highlights on the lessons in this class.

After reading Melissa’s blog, I decide to borrow a wonderful video about design.  I resonate a lot with the quote “design thinking is more than just thinking, you can’t have design without doing. It is almost as if you have to think and do at the same time. If you only have thinking, you wouldn’t be designing” This shows the importance of hands on experience in design.

Over the last two weeks, I have become more aware of my own thinking process. It is especially apparent when I am working with the overinteractive CEO today and how we fill out the business model canvas together. Before 2012, I have always solved my problem using intuition and my algebra skills. I tended to quantify, measure and think in terms of logical steps that would lead to a conclusion.

This January, I had an consulting engagement with the goal of improving a private companies operations. I learned that the key step to start any engagement was to develop a big picture map. How does this relate to design thinking?

It inspired me to be more active in drawing on write board. It made a visual thinker. Now, my thinking process is more than just the content itself but it is includes a framework that I can visually organize the information in a meaningful way. This can be simply a flow chart of all the key steps in the organization and it can also be a comparison table between two products.

From the video by Roger Martin, I understand that design thinking has two parts; analytic and intuition. Most of the people, especially myself, focus on the analytical aspect and replies heavily on past data. Coming from a computer science and a mathematics background, it is very apparent that I rely completely on analytical thinking.

Intuition, as Roger describes, is “Knowing without reasoning”. It is our gut feelings. And our  gut is full of data that we are unconscious of. In design, we have to develop both our analytical thinking skills as well as the intuitive feeling from our gut. It’s only when both are working in harmony, then we can achieve exponential results.

Many big companies focus much on efficiency and rewards only for efficiency and productivity. The idea of creativity is totally out of sight. Over time, the big companies cease to innovate and becomes a failure. I am looking forward to excel in both creativity and efficiency in my coming job, using what I learn in Comm 388.

After reading Lockwood: Importance of integrated thinking, I realize that analytical thinking provides only incremental innovation. Analytical thinking is made to provide consistent results, to have a proven strategy. However, this is not important when you are seeking new innovative idea that allows you to differentiate in the market place.

Mc Donald is a great example on early stage of design thinking, by testing out new store layouts and food menu items before scaling big. And design thinking is usually perceived to be complicated. If visualization is used, then it gets a lot easier. Therefore, it is important for design studio students to learn how to draw an effective diagram that organize the information nicely and communicating with more than words, but with pictures and colors and location.

Also, service design is considered to be more complicated than product design because it  is view as a changing process. Touch point is an interesting concept to me because it breaks down the journey into a component and allows the us to really think about how we usually reach out to target audience.

Lastly, it seems to be a repeating concept that emotions play an important part in design. In Steve Jobs, he mentioned that “we designed the buttons so well that you would want to lick them”. In the future, I see that business will lean towards rapid prototyping and using technology to aid the feedback process in a timely and efficient manner.

One interesting video on how Technology works with human instead of going against human is: