Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Design Thinking
For the first three weeks of March, the Academy for Entrepreneurship
and Innovation came to our class to do an exercise in design thinking. I
had read about the design thinking process in David Kellys book,
Creative Confidence, but it was a completely different experience to
actually go through the entire process with an idea that our group had
created. Our task for the next three weeks was to design a solution for
University of Maryland students to become less stressed. With that simple mission, we had begun a
weeklong adventure to develop our app, RemindMe an app that syncs to the Enterprise Learning
Management System, or ELMS, to remind students when their assignments are due well in advance of
their due date. By pushing them not to push off their homework and quizzes by constant text message
and notification reminders, students would not procrastinate as much, and would not be as stressed.
The first step to design thinking is to empathize with your end user. We watched a video of an IDEO
team going through the process to learn how to do this. The IDEO team went straight to the customers
and brought them into the
design process. They did this
through conducting interviews
to construct a point of view for
the end user. They were very
mindful of the questions that
they asked, and kept it casual;
its not a survey, its a conversation. They used a technique called anchoring, where they asked the
interviewee about a specific moment; its much easier to get your interviewee to open up if you ask
them about a specific moment or detail. The questions were open ended, and ensured that the
information was accurate by restating the critical information that was received from the end user.
Asking these questions allowed for a breadth of ideas that would late aid in the problem solving. The
most useful step of this for me was the workshop on how to interview people. I believe that I can
empathize with the end user, however asking the right kinds of questions, and completing the
Course Activities 18
Need
Insight
Verbs, not
Grounds
nouns
(overwhelming itself in
solution) or too Empathy
narrow
(youve
already solved
your problem)
different strategies for dealing with stress, so though I had narrowed down the problem, I still did not
have a solution.
Once the questions had been gathered, it was time to define our problem. This is the key step in design
thinking that leads it to be such an innovative process. The interview had given us our end use and our
need we need a way for University of Maryland Undergraduate students to stress less. However, we
still needed the insight that would help us to develop our problem.
Defining our problem would also allow us to focus on the users point of view,
and to do this we used a ladder technique. We took a few key points gathered
during our interviews, and broke them down, asking why at every point.
Continuing this process, we finally ended up with the answer to our Why do
students procrastinate? problem. Ultimately, they dont have the self-control to
sit down and do work that they dont want to do. Now that we had defined our problem, it was time to
figure out how to solve that problem! Like I mentioned in my introduction, I have a commitment to
lifelong learning, and I am always asking why. Seeing how to actually make use of that information in
why ladders was a particularly useful skill to me. I will definitely be using why ladders in the future
not only for design thinking purposes, but as a study guide for my exams!
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Course Activities 20
After the rapid generation of solutions, it is time to select an idea to work with. The ideas were selected
specifically for potential, not for feasibility, thereby assuring we did not get the same result we would
have from brainstorming. Continuing to develop the solution, and iterating the selection process would
allow for selection of the best possible solutions, not the ones that were simple to do. Ideation was
particularly helpful to me because I have a tendency to shoot down ideas that arent immediately
feasible, but I need to learn to open my mind because maybe someone else will find a way to
accomplish what I think is impossible.
While ideation was probably the funniest,
prototyping was by far the most useful and
exciting step. Once we had narrowed down
the idea and solution, we were able to create
our prototype something that our end users
were actually able to interact with. It was
slightly crudely made, only drawings on a
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Course Activities 22
Creative Confidence
Creative Confidence has had perhaps the most profound effect on me more than any other book we
have read this semester. Two of the biggest obstacles I face are my lack of self-confidence and my
tendency to procrastinate. Creative confidence has helped me start to tackle both of those weaknesses
this semester.
Firstly, Creative Confidence has helped me to just do it. Being confident in my abilities is not always
easy, but this semester I took a big leap. My honors college, Digital Cultures and Creativity, requires
four specific classes for the program, culminating in the last semester with the capstone course. My
Digital Cultures and Creativity capstone2, the DCC ETC, integrates the concepts I have explored in my
time in Digital Cultures and Creativity, both in class and the workshops held outside of class. DCC ETC
is a data visualization project that attempts to change meaningless information as a thing and turn it
into something much more impactful. Many introductory biology students are often baffled by,
arguably, the most vital, yet abstruse function in living systems cellular respiration. My capstone will
attempt to convey how one of the parts of cellular respiration, the electron transport chain, operates
through an interactive model of the system. DCC ETC will utilize 3D printing and an Arduino to
ensure that my model is more accurate, engaging, and interactive than other models that Ive come
across in my career as a biology student.
While this project may sound interesting to an onlooker, it becomes far more complicated by the fact
that I have very little experience with CAD or Arduino. In a semester where I am absolutely swamped
with schoolwork, I have had to teach myself how to 3D model and how to code and integrate a
microcontroller with all of the components necessary to set up a model for a very complex process. The
old me would have given up and picked an easier project, but the person who read the book Creative
Confidence was able to convince herself that she would be able to complete the project, and I stuck with
it.
I expand upon this idea in my conclusion, but I have never been very creative when it comes to artistic
talents, however, when I was forced out of my comfort zone into making a cooler last year, I became
2
Get Help.
Create Peer Pressure
Gather an Audience
Do a Bad Job
Lower the Stakes
These five steps will help me in my academic career as well as my professional future, and this book
has certainly helped me to improve myself for the better.
Creative Confidence 24
Creative Confidence 25