Reflection of Design Thinking- Comm 388
Thinking is probably the most frequent thing we do in our daily life. We woke up thinking and fall asleep while thinking. However, when I have been asked how do you think, suddenly I lost my words.
It’s the first time that I seriously start to think what is my thinking process. The first thing I came up with is intuition. I don’t feel like my thinking process is following a specific pattern. So when I heard of design thinking, I feel so surprising. Because there are so many staffs that flew across my mind at the “thinking moment”, and we just cannot stop it. However, the studio activity “business in a backpack” changed my mind.
I remembered when I searched for the “resources” in my purse, I founded so many cards like bus pass, printing card, student id, and then I started by asking questions to myself, why should I carry so many cards everyday. Meanwhile my teammate Lu also raised the same question as I did. Afterwards we started with this point and came up with our business idea of making “All in one campus card”. When I look back to see how we established this business idea, I found out all my thinking process start with a question.
Questioning is always a good start which unlocks key insight into the creative thinking process. I mentioned before that thinking sometimes could be a very fast process that may stop you from digging deeply. We have to create some islands of slowness. Questioning, in that way slow down the thinking and provide you with a clear direction of thinking. Questioning is also built on your intuitive observations, afterwards it build up another platform to generate more thoughtful idea. Just like Tim Brown says in his article “strategy by design”, “ in a sense we built to think”.
At the same time, I am also surprised that we are able to create a new business opportunity in such a short time by searching our backpacks. It seems like business opportunity is everywhere that you don’t really have to be a professional designer or inventor to create a new product or doing business innovation. Unfortunately, many people continue to think innovation in a very narrow term. A new invented product like ipad is the outcome of the business innovation. New software like mac ios are engineered, but it is also designed and innovated – “some one must came up with the concept of what is going to do”. All the innovations are “tangible out comes of design thinking,” said by time brown, “strategy by design”.
Design thinking can be a powerful tool when you bring it into the strategic discussion. It is generally a prototyping process that helps you visually describing your strategy. Meanwhile “Design-thinking is rapidly emerging as an attitude and a methodology that equips us with the capability to imagine viable differences, to translate them into designs, evaluate options and move to implementation.” By using design thinking, you are able to make many small changes that may contribute to future innovation in many ways.