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: