Design Thinking (General Class)
Week 1
In the first lesson, we were introduced to the Design Thinking process. We were first given a warm-up activity of making the tallest self-standing tower out of a single A4 paper. For me, I knew that to make it taller, an easy way was to tear it in half and stack it. Someone else on the table did that so I wanted to try expanding on it. So I tried tearing it into smaller pieces and stacking it up. Unfortunately, that didn't work as I intended but I did learn that I should try out more ideas at once when I am prototyping instead of being so sorely focused on one idea.
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Through this, Micca then introduces us to the concept of Design Thinking. Typically in process of creating something, we would first orientate what we would like to create and then we simply make a plan and build it. But this leaves many gaps in the design and leads to poorly designed products. An example given was Google Glass which didn't fall in line with what the market and users wanted.
ORIENTATE
PLAN
BUILD
Instead of this method, a better way to create something would be the Design Thinking process. This process is not always linear but what this allows for is better insights into the things we are going to create. The reason is it allows us to empathise and understand the core human need, instead of surface-level observations.
EMPHATISE
DEFINE PROBLEM
IDEATE
PROTYPE
TEST
ASSIGHNMENT:
Our first assignment was to find an article from LS:N.Global and do a case study on it. It must demonstrate empathy being applied and have to be within your domain (3D Domain for me). We had to write why we had chosen this article and how it will impact my creative process.
For me, I chose the article "Feminity Rebranded". It talks about how companies are redefining the way we view the modern woman’s identity. When it comes to products marketed toward women, they are often colour-coded with “feminine” colours, especially pinks. And that image unfortunately doesn't line up with how women think of themselves. This article talks about ways that how different brands use different colour schemes, humour and reliability to better represent females. And this was done through packaging, art, branding and illustrations
My key takeaway from this article was relating it to the current products in the market. Often we see companies designing two different products of the same function. They are different in colour scheme and designs but the female's version often has a trade-off. An example would be common hygiene products like shavers. But it expands beyond that to things like toys and games. And it leads to the question of whether is there a need to market and design 2 separate designs.
Week 2
In this lesson we went more in-depth with the first stage of the Design Thinking process, Empathise. Specifically, we went through the different Qualitative Research Methods we can use. When we first start the process, it starts off with observing the environment and what is tangible to the surface. It is defined as a research method that focuses on obtaining data from open-ended and conversational questions. Its focuses on quality, not quantity, and can provide researchers with in-depth understanding through interviews. There are many types of Qualitative Research Methods. These includes:
1. In-Depth Interview:
Be bold and curious about the things that they know
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2. Case Studies:
Look for articles relevant to your topic (LSN, world news)
Have a genuine interest in knowing about the topic
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3. Focus Group:
Ask Clear questions.
Not for the general public but for a specialised group related to the topic
4. Ethnographic Research:
Hands-on, on site learning
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5. Process of Observation (AEIOU):
Activities, Environment, Interaction, Objects, Users
Through observation, we are able to gain insights into the topic. And with these insights, we will know what to create. The one way to gain insight through your observation is to use the 5 Whys method. Basically, it is to keep asking why is something this way until we get to the motivation behind it. It allows you to develop your insight and find the key issue to solve. Observations are only what is present, Insights are the issue behind everything.
ASSIGHNMENT:
This week we were assigned a partner whom we will have to interview. My partner was Celia, a student from the fashion domain. We needed to find out 50 facts about our partner through interviews and observations. Hence we decided to meet on Wednesday before our learning journey to have lunch and do our interview. This exercise is meant to help us make our partners comfortable to openly share about themselves. Honestly, the experience was really fun and enlightening which allowed me to make a new friend and learn about a new perspective.
Week 3
For this lesson, at the start of the class we went through the assignment from our previous lesson. Through reflecting we were able to see why we needed to ask 50 question. It is because it ususally takes 30 question for the other person to open up. We also looked at the types of questions that we asked. There are 2 types listed below:
Demographics:
Identifies things on the surface.
Usually surveys will ask this sort of questions
It helps collect data that help to build the person
Psychographics:
They are deeper question
Such as Likes, dislikes. How are you?
Will touch on their feelings, interests at a more intimate level
An advice given for if you are nervous during the interview was to try starting with demographic questions first, then switching to more psychographic ones. Towards the end, you can eas the questions to more demographic questions this way helps to ease the conversations for both the interviewer and interviewee.
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Afterwards we continue with the actual lesson proper. We firstly went through what Persona and Empathy Map was.
PERSONA
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What is a persona?
It is a fictional character you create based on your research to represent the different user types that might us your product, service, etc.
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What does a persona do?
Tells us who is our target audience. It helps us to understand our user needs and desire.
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What does it consist of?
A Persona template: Name, Persona description, job to be done. User cases, pain & gain, stories, photo
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Why make a persona?
It helps to visualise the process: summarise the data into concise points to allow for others to easily read them
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How do you make a persona?
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Pain & Gain: Gather the pain points and gain points of the product from the user.
- Pain: What are his worries of the user? What frustrate you the most about….?
By knowing the pains, we can use it as a strategy.
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- Gain: How does the current products makes the user happy?
By knowing your gain, it give you an idea of what they want and what they want from the products.
It can be use to improve certain task or action of the product.
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Job to be done: This is the anchor point for “where” to create value. Align your vision with the goals of the users.
It gives you an idea of what to build. And how to get people to switch to our products.
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Do feel free to put in pictures and stories to keep the persona alive. When doing this, it is important to think of the user as a real person. Refine and dig deeper through the 5 Whys. If you don't dig deep enough, you can end up with Persona Twins. Persona Twins are personas that share the same points about themself (typically demographic type facts) but they have very different experiences and lifestyles fundamentally. To prevent that we have to ask more detailed questions and more about their pains and gain points.
Empathy Map
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How do you obtain data from it?
Create surveys about it to gather data. Talk to those users. Assume a beginner mindset and leave your own assumption behind. Don’t have any first impressions
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What is an empathy map?
A collaborative visualization used to articulate what we know about a particular user. Observe from what they are:
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1. Thinking & Feeling 2.Hearing
3. Seeing 4. Speaking & Doing.
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From this we can figure out what their gain & pain points.
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Empathy is feeling WITH people. It is a vulnerable choice where I have to connect it with my own self. A response rarely makes it better, but a connection will. To empathise is to put yourself in your shoe. Empathy is the heart of design, Without understanding of what they see, hear, do, designing is pointless
Week 4
In this lesson we learn about how to define our problem statement. In order to do so we need to synthesis the data that we have. Synthesis in Design thinking involves creativity piecing the puzzle together to form one whole ideas, organising, interpreting, and making sense of the data to form a problem statement. It is so we can create a coherant understanding of what we know about the project. It is meant to define and find the core issue of the problem. One way to get to the problem is to use the 5 Why to get to the core issue. This allows for consensus in a group project and gives a clear journey of the evidence behind the design.
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Through the problem statement, it gives us a basis we can turn to check if we are on track. Questions such as "Is my project related to the user?" and "Does it meet their needs?" are question that are important to turn to as we progress into our project. Through the problem statement, we are trying to know what causes the problem and what is the underlining behaviour of the users. It is also important to look for different people for input as the richest insights comes from multiple people. In order to get there, be sure to observe and record the data points and this way you be able to come up with 3 to 8 insights.
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The problem statement states who you are designing for, bring focus to the needs of the user. It establishes who the users are, their needs and the insights that we have gained
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Example:
_______(Users) might need a way to _______(User need) that//because//but ______ (User-based insights)
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From there we can change this statement into a question.
Example:
How might we help ______ (Users) solve ______ (User need) while also _______ (User-based insights)
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By phrasing it as a question, we are questioning and changing our own perspective on the topic and altering the way we see things. When we ask this question, it is not that we have a solution in mind already. We do not want to know the solution; we are the ones that create a new idea to solve it. So, it is important to gather insights on our topic to define our problem statement.
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Week 5
For this week's lesson, we learned about how to find the right focus group. The first thing we need to do is to define a point-of-view to focus on. This comes from first understanding and observing the situation. This way we have a common knowledge base that allow us to establish who we should focus on. It is important to have empathy in this situation as it allows us to better identify our point-of-view to focus on.
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From there, we can use the information gather to establish our "How might we" statement. It can first start from a statement that defines the nature of the problem. But wording it into a question helps to alter our way of thinking & viewing our design problem, and allow us to find a useful angle.
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After that we can use the 6WH question to help establish concrete information about a specific situation, motivation of our users, and analyze and scrutinize the information we have. The 6WH questions are: What, Who, Why, Where, When & How. This process of questioning is basically Design Thinking in progress. So how do we use the 6WH questions
UNDERSTAND
OBSERVE
IDEATE
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Create a set of 6WH questions
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Make a list of possible sub questions
- Try to answer all the 6WH questions
- If the WH question make no sense in the context of the problem, skip it
- If the Wh question were used with the user in context of a problem interview, try to dig deeper by probing and repeating questions
- Try to find more than one answer to every question. Conflicting answer can be of particular interest and should be amplified more deeply together with the user
- Evaluate the answer only at the end and filter the statement only with relevancy to the solution
Through asking these questions, especially "Who" questions, we will be able to know who our stakeholders are, which are people like the users, decision makers, companies, etc. The purpose of identifying our stakeholder is so that we have a grasp on all the players that are involve in the process. The types of stakeholders involve are those of the user, the community they are involved in, the services involved in serving the user, and the institute that govern decision made about the product. In order to fully understand this concept, we had to do an exercise in pairs. We had to go onto LSN Global and chose an article. We has to do up our research and find out who are the key stakeholder involve in this product the article mentions. My partner, Disha and I chose to do an article about an aroma detector that could eliminate organic food waste. This was what we wrote down for our stakeholders.
The last thing that we have to consider are our Impact Goals which are our Influence or effect goals we wish to achieve.
It is often this immediate outcome that we believe will contribute to that change. In the process of your project, you uncover expectations for the long-term change that ultimately matters as well or more immediate outcomes that will contribute to the change. It is often these more immediate outcome, or smaller shift in behaviours, that will become the focus of your design project. We were given the task below to fill in about our project.
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Task
The Lasting Social Change I would like to contribute to is: ________ (Long Term Impact, Future Vision)
The Key Outcome of my design solution is working toward is: _______ (Immediate Goal, Observed Change)​
Lastly, she went through the meta-model of solution design which allows us to connect the dots of our projects.
Week 6
The topic of today's lesson was Designing for the Future. For the first part of the lesson, we watch a documentry, The Mind Explained (Netflix) Episode 3). This video talks about creativity and how we as human be creativity. Is creativity an inate skill or a learned skill? I think it is something that we have to grow into and learne] to do it. Creativity comes from combining other ideas and it isn't a one person task. It is building on other's ideas and being inspired by other creator
Afterwards we were given a task of writing a story in our table. We had to link our story to our own project. We each had to write a portion of the story before passing onto the next person to write the next part. The result of which led to rather funny tales from our group and the other group. I truly didn't know how our story would carry out and it just kept getting weirder and weirder as it kept getting pass on. Is it creative? I guess so but the result are quite chaotic but fun. Overall, it allowed us to flex our improv muscles and creative thinking.
Afterwards we learned about Vision Cone. It aloows us to connect the current innovative developments with the future and the past. It showcases our overall vision and divide it into feasible steps. Lastly it helps gives the project a plausible, possible, prefered, or bizarre future accurately. It gives us a sense of the changes over time, especially since technology move pretty quickly that an overview is hard. It is also easier to think in sections from the past to the present to the future. Our task in the future was to fill in a vision cone of our own project.
Task
We were also givena task to read and reflect on an article from LSN. We had to reflect on the vision of the article, the future it describes and do you agree and disagree. It is due on 8th October, with a 500 word limit. And it doesn't need to be related to your domain
Week 8 (Term Break)
During the team break, we had to write an essay reflecting on the vision of an article from LS:N.Global. We had to identify what was the vision the article presented to us and whether we agreed with or supported it. We also had to reflect and see if there were any potential problems that may arise from it. The article I chose was about a jewellery company called Finematter that was trying to be sustainable by introducing their customers to other options that they can approach in terms of reusing and recycling their old jewellery pieces.
Week 9
This week we were given a talk by Pixie Tan & Ryan Tan regarding their book Don’t Mind If I Ask. This book is a compilation of survey data of graphic designers in Singapore regarding their experiences. Even though it was aimed at graphic designers, it is relevant for other design areas in Singapore. This book came about by them asking the question "Why is it so hard to find information about this industry?" They notice that it is only bad news that spread about this industry. People only really rely on hearsay and they are usually only bad news. Hence they sought to rectify this issue.
Step 1: Defining the problem
Surveys. There are currently surveys that exist on this topic but there aren’t local ones. These surveys are to find out about a Creative's life and progress
Step 2: Defining the questions
What is it like to work in Design?
Frame the process is like.
DESIGN: There are so many types of design
WORK: there are different factors to it; age, experience, day/lifetime, and satisfaction. Work-life balance
Who works in this industry?
How does this industry work?
Are we happy?
How happy are we in our job?
306 QUESTIONS
It is categorised into different sections for different groups of people. Embracing the ugly part of the design. It gives them an insight into this experience and allowed them to contrast between different groups of people. You don’t necessarily have to be in design in the future. Other industries may have a design vacuum that can be filled by designers.
An inaugural independent inquiry on the well-being of Singapore’s Design Community and Industry
How do you give people a sense of inclusivity? The lines are blurring in designs and now people are asking and requiring different things from designers.
Step 3: Understanding your audience
Surveys that long are not appealing to people to answer. Chose Typeform as it was more interactive even though it is more expensive. How do you make the survey more interesting because it can be boring?
Step 4: Reaching your audience
How do we reach our audience? How do we make the survey interesting and appealing? The name of it was scrutinized and changed before finally settling on its current name
They did an Instagram page that answer what they are. Their background and reason they are doing this.
Step 5: Analysing the answer
506 RESPONSE
Had to do something visual. It wasn’t a pretty process. How do you present it clearly? Is it helpful for his survey? The analysing took a year and a half to process.
Step 6: Communicate the finding
Have people that would help do the survey as backers
It was not to be the coolest design. It is for people who are interested in knowing this data. It is not just designers but people from other industries.
Try to display the data cleanly and interesting. Also, try to not be sorely negative. Even if there are some cons shown, counterpoints are shown as well
Step 6.5 – 8: Spotting the gaps, filling the gaps, design
They say the print is so dead, so why did you make a book?
They jump between making it digital or printing it. Digital I cheap but printing is not. But to remember stuff clearly, reading it physically is better. They were also thinking about whether they should get people to pay for it
A report is so dry so decided to make the book fun to look at. There were also qualitative sections so that it is more human
Giving articles from other people to give different viewpoints from different people
From this process, there were a few key takeaways for both of the authors:
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Lesson One: There are 2 sides to a story
Lesson Two: Only you can decide the right path
Lesson Three: Help is within reach
Lesson Four: Change take actions (and time!)
Curiosity is tied to interest. Let your interest lead the way.
Be all right with being uncomfortable. How do you ask a difficult question? Just be ignorant and stupid and just ask boldly. Maintaining a level of curiosity is hard. What is the purpose of doing this?
Breaking down the process into a structure you can follow. Having a deadline (there are concrete and un-concrete ones). Be sure to take of your health
Having fresh eyes is useful. What is useful feedback, and what isn’t? Intention behind.
Sometimes feedback isn’t given. Some feedback is private and confidential. But all feedback is useful. Don’t get emotionally attached to your ideas.
Week 10
On week 10, we watched a documentary called Design Disruptor: The Future is Design - A Documentary by InVision. It was about how companies and products—intentionally or not— shake billion-dollar industries.
After that, we had to post on the Miro Board answering this question: Is there anything you have learned from the video?
Afterwards, Micca went through with us what the Ideation stage of the design process is. Imagination & creativity is about going beyond what is the norm, it is a muscle that gets better and better each time. Enjoy the process. The myth about lone genius creators is not true as they are built upon others’ ideas. It requires many prototypes and experiments. There will be many people helping him.
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Brain Writing & Forced Connection
Without ideas, no new products. Last-minute panic is not ideal for generating ideas. These are her tips on generating ideas:
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Strive Quantity
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Push for novelty
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Withhold judgement
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Open to diversity
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Make connections
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Playfulness
Brainwriting: Writing down ideas and improving on them. Idea lead to Improved idea lead to Improved Improved idea then to Improved improved improved idea
Forced connection: Linking two different items to form a new one
Week 11
We firstly did a quick recap of last week lesson as some student had missed the class due to them having to rush to class, Afterwards we did a group exercise where we had to use our creative muscle by having to come up with solutions for a prompt given. Collectively as a group, we had to come up with 192 different ideas with each of coming up with 24 ideas each. The prompt we were given was: Can you educate your community or find creative ways to help them navigate the cost of living crisis? It was quite hard coming up with so many ideas and eventually some of us starting just making up quick answers but others tried to combine different ideas. But overall it was a fun proces despite the stress and this is the results of it.
Week 13
Fail Forward
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Prototyping & User Testing
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Only through perseverance can allow you succeed
To fail forward means to purposefully and deliberately use failure to find success. It’s a conscious process that first requires us to give up the obsessive need to be perfect.
Storyboarding
Design Thinking is a process. It is not a linear process.
Purpose of storyboard: Helps us to clearly convey how the story will flow and how your ideas fit into your user world. And see the potential design
Creates a low fidelity
Needs: Character= Persona Map/Interview, Setting= Interview/Observation, Plot=Impact goals/System Map
Need to connect all three. Imagine them in the setting
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Prototyping
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Something that the user can experience.
Save time, save money, understand the problem better, get feedback quickly, procrastinate less and get started quickly, build a better product through many iterations
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User Testing
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What do you want to test?
Testing the prototype, not the user. Have a central question in mind. No right or wrong answer, just want their reaction
Recreate a setting in which the user will use it. You will be able to learn more through the interaction.
Observe the environment with AEIOU
Make sure the user knows how the prototype works but do not over-explain it to them. This way we don’t affect their opinion.
When collecting feedback, do it in such a way that doesn’t affect the user interaction with the prototype. So, record it.
Criticize the designs ourselves. Don’t fear judgement.
User testing activities:
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Let users compare alternatives
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Show don’t tell
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Ask users to talk about their experience. Ask specific questions.
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Observe. Don’t correct them. Let them figure it out on their own.
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Wrap and reflect. Allow tester to reflect and summarise their feedback
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Consolidate all your results, and organise them into a grid. Have some exchanges with the users.
Week 14
Week 14 and 15 were both consultation weeks in which we could have one on one consultations with Micca. I had booked mine for week 15. But for Week 14, we also had a WIP exhibition where the whole cohort could display their current progress. So on Thursday, I did up my poster for it and showcased my progress. I was also given some helpful feedback as well.
Week 15
This week I had a short consultation with Micca and talked with her in regard with my progress and told her that I was currently working on my branding and video. She suggested that I looked at Muji as a brand and see that my branding should be aimed as a lifestyle things with the sustainability taking a back seat. I found that advice to be really helpful in making my logo later that week