It was interesting that what brought about most of our groups insights was just looking at the picture for a while and noticing little details and making things up about them, even if they aren’t significant (predictably, time management became a problem and this attention to detail took a lot of it). Something less predictable was the difficulty in empathizing with a character that is entirely new. Usually, things are designed to solve our own problems or those of like-minded people, but we had no relation to this character. Despite the copious observations, we could only assume that the person was similar enough to us that our thinking was valid (as an aside, it would be interesting to design for someone whose thinking and values are entirely different from those of human beings). Something else that presented a challenge was the “process” that we were instructed to follow. In insisting on sharp separation between “stages” the connection between them was stretched and ideas could not easily flow from one step to the next. A line of thinking would sometimes die because we “weren’t supposed to go there yet” and its intent would be forgotten.
As improvement for the next time, I would suggest placing emphasis on the “process” being a framework, not instructions. I would still focus on the small details, as the normal things of everyday life show how people really live. I found that we were good at this and that finding out how people lived is really the key to quick design.
1 Comment
9/17/2016 05:02:43 am
Sorry, Zach. I left my comment on this post in the "test" post.
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Welcome to Design Thinking: a half-year course guided by Garreth Heidt with a focus on fixing real-world problems by observing people and the challenges they face daily.
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