• 

Testing is the final step to the Design Thinking process. All the experimenting, data gathering, and idea tweaking were all done in order to nearly perfect your project into something must greater. While all the experimenting was with multiple people at different times, with testing out your project, you’re doing it to multiple people all at once without any kind of prep for it unless specified otherwise. The testing process is probably the most nerve-racking and intense step of the overall Design Thinking process as you need to have an app, that is assumed to be changed up and fixed for the final moment, ready to be shown to the entire room you’re in and running to the point that you can show what you’ve spent a majority of your time doing. And after you’ve shown it off, you then have to brace yourself for the overwhelming praise and criticism it is bound to get, both positive and negative. All of that sounds stressful but it’s just as simple as the other steps that you’ve had to do up until this point.

In Design Thinking, testing is a step that can be applied at any point of the process and still work out in the end. As Rikke Dam and Teo Siang said in their article Stage 5 in the Design Thinking Process: Test “Testing can be undertaken throughout the progress of a Design Thinking project, although it is most commonly undertaken concurrently with the Prototyping stage.” While the testing phase can be used at any point in the process, it is commonly advised to use it alongside the Prototyping phase since you’re testing your project immediately after experimenting with it anyway. There are many ways in which to test out your project all of which have been applied in many fields of thinking. The most common way of testing is to conduct a user test on the audience and have them mess around with it to see how they interact with the piece in order to get your point across. This, in turn, helps with giving the audience the full experience of utilizing your app in a way that it’s supposed to be used and get a feel for how it’s supposed to work. After that, however, the audience is then allowed to give criticism to what they’ve experienced with the project since they assumed that this is the final build to it and they are under the impression that everything is said and done. This is where it’s possible for your project to fall apart altogether especially if you didn’t take the criticisms into consideration or you didn’t take the time to make the necessary changes that it needed. However, any criticism should be seen as a stepping stone to a better product and to better your creativity as a whole, whether it succeeds or not.

This was the case of what I had to do in class after we all did the experimenting and tweaking to our projects. For my project, I came up with the idea of a GarageBand app for Game Design rather than music since it’s a concept that people wouldn’t think to do, at least not on an iPhone. Thanks to Marvel App, I came up with the app, GarageGame, an app in the same vein as Unity and Unreal only better utilized for making mobile games on the go. This was done to give the novelty of being able to make a game on the go without having to rely on an outside computer to be able to do so, especially when making a game on the phone. While the relevancy was on a high when presented to the class, it was still a good step in the creative process and helps to remind me that novelty is better than relevancy.

Overall, as a final step for Design Thinking, it’s a good step to end on since you’re entire research and experimentation is all culminated into one project to show off to the world. And with the right tools and a good amount of research, you will make something extraordinary but overall what no one would think to come up with.

Prototyping is a super important step in the Design Thinking process that you can come across. After you’re done coming up with the stupidest idea on paper, it’s time to put that idea into full force, on actual paper. Prototyping is another everyday thing everyone does when designing a project they’ve put so much time into. It’s simply taking the idea that you’ve thought of in your head and experimenting on other people. Prototyping can be done in many ways, such as but not limited to: sketching, building, mapping, wire-framing, and story-boarding. There are many ways to do a prototype that you can go either way and you’ll get different results to your solution.

In Design Thinking, prototyping becomes essential in gathering data about your solution, how the solution may impact people depending on their stances and thinking of new ways to better perfect it to appease to a large number of people. You’re taking the three other steps you’ve used throughout your project making and applying them to the final project after you’ve done some beta testing. As Rikke Dam and Teo Siang said in their article Stage 4 in the Design Thinking Process: Prototype “When designers want to determine and understand exactly how users will interact with a product, the most obvious method is to test how the users interact with the product.” If you want to get a better understanding of how people will interact and feel about the product, you will have to experiment with the product in a way that doesn’t show itself as a finished product. This is the case when it comes to Science and anything else that involves experimentation, even Game Design. With any idea you can think of, there is always a possibility of it either not boding well with what the people want or just faltering altogether because of it not applying to the problem at hand. And so to prevent the possibility of that happening, or at least lower it, experimentation has to be done in order to receive feedback on the idea which can also help in making it better.

This is what the professor had us do in class when going over prototyping. After we came up with our outlandish ideas and put them down on pieces of paper that resembled how something would look like on our perspective phones, we were then tasked to have everyone essentially playtest out apps and see how they interact and react to its interface and usability. We then ask the person playtesting our apps to give feedback on what they think of the app, what works, what doesn’t work and what needs to be fixed or added on to the app. We had to do this two times over each time with a different person in order to get different experiences from different people at once. More often than not, we would either get completely different feedback from different people or get the same criticism altogether, which further give the hint that our apps would need major improvements on one specific area in order to be better than it is.

With prototyping comes to an interesting experience that you will probably never have without doing this at least once. It’s always helpful to experiment on different ideas to see which one sticks out to you the most and becomes the most successful. Hence, without prototyping, there would be no need to innovate on different ideas for the future and people would just take things for granted. Otherwise, doing a simple beta test or sketch on the idea is more than enough to get feedback from a large number of people.

• 

Ideation is a concept that every single human being is capable of doing. In many cases, people think about what they could do in a certain environment or what they can make that’s completely original, usually in the arts and anything creative. And these ideas come from the person’s creativity of anything simple that they’ve seen before, which usually helps when it comes to making something new. This is especially important in Design Thinking since the concept of coming up with ideas from scratch is well fitted with teaching people new things that you would never come up with and thinking of better ways to practice a certain activity that doesn’t involve doing the same thing over and over again.

In the Design Thinking world, Ideation is seen as “the creative process of generating, developing, and communicating new ideas, where an idea is understood as a basic element of thought that can be either visual, concrete, or abstract. Ideation comprises all stages of a thought cycle, from innovation to development, to actualization.” In many cases, people rely on this type of creative thinking to better visualize a certain project that they wouldn’t even think to do in the first place. And for the most part, it is evident that this is needed in anything we do on a regular basis as we always want to come up with something outlandish and continue to go with the idea until it comes out as a better product. As said by Mark Twain himself “The man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.” Twain has a point since cranking out new ideas is what we essentially do as it’s all in the Creative Spirit to do so. Sometimes you may not even realize you came up with a good idea or something unexpected until either someone points it out or it clicks to you immediately after, so much so that ideating almost becomes second nature. And in Design Thinking, that’s what you’re going to be doing 90 percent of the time because you’re going to need some material to work with if you want to make something super unique.

This was the case with us in class as we had to come up with the silliest and most outlandish application that we can possibly think of while looking for other things we can bounce off, which is another thing we tend to do as humans. Since we like to look at other people’s ideas and see what we can do to give it a little bit of a spin, that’s what we did in class. The most we had to look up were parodies to different objects that were or are popular which were changed up to make it seem funny. And in that sense, we tried to come up with something that no one would think to use on a daily basis and somehow try to make it work, essentially it’s to think stupid until the idea sticks to your brain.

Overall, Ideation is an important step that not everyone would think is important to them, it always involves random thinking of ideas, and sometimes the most outlandish ideas can be surprising, especially when you find out about the end product. Once you start applying this step into your everyday life, which will be inevitable, you will always think of the dumbest things in the world that will someday be the smartest thing you came up with.

Define is a word that a lot of people can take the association to and use it as a basis for what they do in everyday life. More times than not, we usually use Define as finding what a word means on a broader scale and use that to dictate how we even use the word we’re finding. However, when it comes to the work space, we’re actually using the word a bit differently than how we’re used to. At first, it may sound very complicated but the more we figure out how the word is used in Design Thinking the more often we’ll be able to use the actual word to our advantage.

In the world of Design Thinking, we use the word Define as a way of breaking down a problem from the inside out and then seeing asking ourselves if there are any individual issues within the big picture that is directly impacting the people around us. We then think of how the people are feeling towards the problem at hand while also coming up with solutions in order to combat it. This all sounds like it’s a difficult task and that may be true for those who don’t have a very active imagination or those who are not prevalent at coming up with solutions. However, even with those weaknesses that some people have, it’s still not even that hard to at least think of something that works for everyone. Really, it all boils down to working with others and as a team to do these things since it’s normally harder but possible to do it alone.

Thanks to the article on Writing Effective Problem Statements by Christian Reuter, there is a good idea of how to do this step in Design Thinking very effectively, as in the title. First, what you need to do is work with your team collaboratively to discuss the material you’re working with and how you could review it on a broader scale. After that is when you write the statement you want to solve in a way that sounds convincing, the statement of which should be worded as a question in order to get our creative juices flowing. An example of a statement would be “How can we provide aspiring developers with the resources they need to grow and learn?” A way of making the statement not limit us in terms of our creativity and encourage us to think outside the box. The only other thing to do with the problem statement is to visualize it, whether it’s drawing it on a sheet of paper, writing the integrating problems on sticky notes, or doing anything you can to show it off to the group in any way shape or form.

In our class, our professor had us do everything that is said in this article but with two extra thinking motives to do in it. We were looking into our campus to see which of the problems we had were affecting the students as a whole. For my group, we decided that the biggest problem is the shuttle system and parking. The shuttle system because some shuttles take you to certain places and take a long time to even get to those places, not only that but the number of shuttles is very limiting, especially given the number of students here. And parking because on campus there is very limited parking for students and even when there is parking, they are mostly reserved for a certain amount of people or they can’t park there at all. So after taking notes on the overarching problem and how it’s affecting the students, we then have to come up with solutions on how to we could fix the problem. Some of the solutions we came up with include increasing the number of shuttles going to and from the campus and increasing the number of parking spaces for students to park in. And then we all put them on sticky notes and stick them to the table for better visualization.

Overall, the “define” step in design thinking is probably more intimidating to others since it requires you and your group to think creatively on the problem you each decided to tackle. However, with the right cooperation and a good thinking environment, it’s not that bad once you get used to it and you get into it better.

Empathy, or the ability to put oneself in the shoes of another, sounds like something that we as human beings do on a daily basis. Even though it’s not something that we think is really simple, because it really isn’t, we often try to utilize that ability in order to understand the feelings of others in a certain situation they’re going through. And in many ways, design thinking involves having empathy in order to understand the needs of the audience we’re adhering to.

In a video we watched that involves empathy, we got to see different people at a hospital and read into what they’re thinking as they are going through the hallways. More often than not, we see people thinking about the situation they’re about to go into and what’s happening to them, their family member or their friend that are going through a serious illness or had a rough injury. We then try to put ourselves in the position of those people and try to understand how that may affect us compared to how that may affect the people in the video. In way, we’re already empathizing with the people in a video and really design thinking goes beyond just current situations.

In a section of the Design Thinking Handbook that touched on empathy, the people they referred to, who were analyzing and exploring the situation at hand, were thinking about how this could affect them and what they can do to solve the problem. Now, for a lot of people, that sounds hard to do, especially since you have to understand how the people are facing the problem. However, it’s actually very simple and we don’t think that because we’re usually not used to trying to solve problems on our own, let alone know what the people around us are thinking in order to fully come to a conclusion on how we should even handle it. If not that, then just us not being able to answer it since we’re not the ones people go to in order to get answers on the problem at hand.

One person that put a good emphasis on empathy is Tim Brown, whom said “Empathy is at the heart of design. Without the understanding of what others see, feel, and experience, design is a pointless task.” And he’s very much right about empathy, if we can’t put ourselves in the shoes of out audience, then there’s no way we can create something that can perfectly help or entertain the audience we’re after. And in an exercise we did in class, we are actually tried to put ourselves in the shoes of the audience, that being the students at Quinnipiac and how they’re feeling towards the shuttle system and how it affects them on campus. And in the case of us, it worked and we came up with a lot of problems, solutions and so on about what we can do about it, mostly because we’ve experienced it ourselves and even the people who didn’t, they already know what think of. In a way, we were sort of “testing” our empathy to see how we can deal with a certain problem through understanding of emotions.

If it sounds like repetition at this point, that’s because empathy leads into the rest of design thinking without needing to do anything else than doing the definition of the word. And overall, the whole concept is simple and important component to doing anything ever.

Since this topic is pretty simple, it’s high time we talk about toast, everyone’s favorite breakfast meal next to waffles and pancakes. However, what we’re gonna be talking about is something completely different than what you expect and that is that making toast is a process that can be applied to basically any situation in life. In a normal scenario, making toast can be broken down into as little as 3 to 4 steps and as many as 5 to 7 steps, depending on how much further into detail the person wants to describe the process.

And ultimately, the entire process involves preparing a certain project with the bare essentials and then inviting people to partake in the experience while also conducting the whole experiment with the group themselves, which usually involves them drawing toast. Then you would have to reflect on what they did with the process and what way they conveyed it in, this would help them prepare for the video in which they watch how the idea of systems thinking can convey to the experience. This will lead right into the entire group drawing the challenge itself and seeing how they can improve it together, the group then share what they came up with to each other and then move on to make the system to that would better explain the entire process in the simplest way.

That entire thing is what all the students had to do and every one of their drawings were interesting to look at because of the way they want to convey and interpret the process of making toast. These drawings arrange from showing the bread and the toaster right away to essentially showing the entire process of making the meal which is very impressive. This is also helped by the fact that we watch an entire TED Talk about the entire process and how the way people convey it can change another person’s perspective on it, such as people wanting to simplify the process to make it easier for others or people who want to go into every single detail to help others understand it a lot better.

Ultimately, this really helped me in seeing toast a lot differently and also gave me another way to actually make toast, hopefully, it tastes a lot better than usual.

Since a lot of people know about this process but don’t really know about steps to implementing this process, I figured I would offer this explanation to those people. Just keep in mind that this will be long and it will take quite a lot of explaining so just brace yourselves.

Design Thinking is the process of taking a multitude of ideas and putting them together in the best way possible. In order for one to do this, they must first go through a 5 step, or mode, procedure to gather all of their ideas to the table. They have to Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test in this specific order if they want to get their point across.

The first thing that one has to do is to Empathize and when you hear the word “Empathy” you normally think of putting yourself in the position of other people and seeing how their situations affect you in any way. And that’s exactly it, this is how you observe different peoples ideas on different circumstances which are normally done through interviewing the person, conversing with different people or just casually observing the person’s reaction to certain things around them. Now people often ask others “Why to empathize with people for an idea if you are coming up with it all on your own?” and that is answered relatively well in the article An Introduction to Design Thinking, which is really just a process guide but it gets the job done, where Hasso Plattner says “As a design thinker, the problems you are trying to solve are rarely your own-they are those of a particular group of people; in order to design for them, you must gain empathy for who they are and what is important to them.” While this applies to really anything that you do in a job or internship, it’s definitely a big deal to do it in this field since for you to think of something to design for them you pretty much have to represent your audience in the best way possible.

The second thing one has to do is Define their idea in whatever way they can. When you already have an idea of what you want to do, you also have to know what the design will mean to you and your audience. In other words, add a bit of clarity and give a good statement as to what it will mean in the future. Fast Company’s article Design Thinking… What is That?, whose author’s name is not specified, sums up the Define step pretty well by stating “Design Thinking requires a team or business to always question the brief, the problem to be solved. To participate in defining the opportunity and to revise the opportunity before embarking on its creation and execution.” So you can tell how important this mode is which leads very well into the next mode which is to Ideate.

Ideating is just as obvious as it sounds, thinking about the ideas you came up with and then going into detail about the concepts and outcomes that may occur over the course of anything you do. This mode just goes beyond designing for different people as it also applies to make something for yourself or just doing something casually, no matter what you’re doing, you’re always going to find yourself thinking of the outcome and how it might affect the people around you or even just yourself. There are many articles in design thinking that explain why you should do this but the overall statement is that Ideating allows you to think of solutions for certain problems and then hypothesizing about what would happen if you go through with it, hence the thinking being true to the overall process.

And then once you’ve got your idea, you know what your audience will be, you know what it will mean in the future and you’ve come up with some solutions to solve the problem as well as made a hypothesis of your own, you then have to do something that literally everyone in every job has to do and that is to go into Prototype mode. If you’ve ever done a project in school/college or an internship before, you know that typically before you show that to the world you have to show it to someone else you know and have them “test” it out. Essentially testing your hypothesis without actually testing your hypothesis, and what I mean by that is showing a sort of beta or working state of your design and seeing how people in your vicinity bodes with it. This is also a good way to get your questions answered and to talk to a couple people about it before showing it off in full, and like with many projects it also gives you the opportunity to make changes to it that can make it different but still get your idea across to the world.

And then after you’ve gotten your questions answered, if not a good chunk of them answered, you then finally come to the Test mode. This is where you finally show your efforts to the world and see what they think of it. Which also gives you the opportunity to do the process all over again, whether people like it or not. So in short, Design Thinking is a big network of complex steps all put together into one simple process that is found in everything you see in the world. And it’s definitely a go-to for a lot of people who want to change the lives of others including themselves.

Sources:
https://dschool-old.stanford.edu/sandbox/groups/designresources/wiki/36873/attachments/74b3d/ModeGuideBOOTCAMP2010L.pdf?sessionID=573efa71aea50503341224491c862e32f5edc0a9
https://www.fastcompany.com/919258/design-thinking-what

Test

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton