This part of my blog tracks learning in the Design Thinking course in 2018, as part of my Master of Design studies at Griffith University. The latest articles appear first, so please start at the bottom if you want to follow the full story!
For me, the Wellbeing Trail was not just a design thinking project, it was a community initiative that deserved every chance to succeed. The organisers had put an incredible amount of effort in, as had the participating organisations and many volunteers. This post summarises the lead up to the event and how things went on …
To present my work on the Samford Wellbeing Trail project to my Masters class, I created a presentation to show the design thinking process and outcomes. The presentation explained the background and context, discussed issues, stakeholders and insights, and showed some of the work I had produced along the way.
The Wellbeing Trail will only be a success if people know about it and turn up on the day. Just as important is for people to follow through after the event by trying to improve or sustain their wellbeing in whatever way suits them. My role in this part of the project was to look …
This stage was the time for trying out ideas, adapting them in response to feedback, implementing any that needed to happen first for practical reasons, and prioritising other ideas for subsequent implementation.
After investigating the situation and immersing in the stakeholders’ environment, it was time to pull together some insights and generate ideas. The insights from the stakeholder research needed to be teased out out and used as a basis for ideation.
This ‘immersion’ stage is central to the Design Thinking process. It’s about understanding the people we are designing for, and getting to grips with the problem (or problems) to be addressed. As mentioned during the investigate phase, the Wellbeing Trail project includes various stakeholders, not just the end users of the design solution. I talked to …
Step 2: Immerse in the stakeholders’ environment Read More »
As is relatively common for a community project, I started working on the Wellbeing Trail idea well before it became a defined project. My client at Samford Commons explained the basic concept back in April this year, and at that stage was looking to get buy-in from potential sponsors or partners. As these partners ranged …
The Samford Wellbeing Trail started off as an idea – how do we make it a reality? On face value it is a simple project involving designing, communicating and promoting an event. However, as a community project involving multiple stakeholders, there are a number of complex issues to be addressed before the visual communication design …
For our second design thinking project, I have chosen to work on an initiative aimed at improving health and wellbeing in our local community (Samford, an outer suburb of Brisbane). The wellbeing initiative is part of a series of community-driven initiatives focused around social, economic and environmental sustainability.
Our first design thinking project was an interesting exercise in applying a design thinking mindset to a specific, human-centric problem. Although resources were limited due to this being a student project, all class members came up with relevant solutions that could be implemented if their project was taken further. And we had a lot of …
After selecting some ideas to take forward, the next step was to prototype these. Prototyping is a way of trying out ideas and unearthing issues or questions that can be investigated through further ideation, prototyping or user empathy research. It is not about building finished solutions. A prototype allows us to ask questions, and learn …
Design thinking is big business. At the time of writing, a Google search for the exact phrase ‘design thinking’ yielded over 13 million results. As a comparison, the term ‘Bauhaus’ yielded 39 million. This relatively close ratio of 1:3 is surprising given that Bauhaus was a highly influential design movement studied extensively over the last …
After empathising with users and defining the problem for our Design Thinking project, the next step was to start finding possible ways of solving the problem! This is called the ‘ideation’ phase. Ideas can be generated through means such as brainstorming, brainwriting, mindmaps, storyboards, challenging assumptions, sketching or many other methods.
The second stage of our design thinking project involved defining the problem or problems we were trying to solve. We used insights from the empathy stage to determine ways of looking at the problem from a human perspective, restating it as a design challenge that can be addressed in the ideation stage. In order to do …
Defining the design challenge from a user’s perspective Read More »
The first stage of design thinking relates to empathising with users – understanding their needs, motivations, thoughts and feelings. For our project we interviewed volunteers from the university as well as observing or interviewing people in external environments and researching friends and family connections.
In this project we’ll be looking at people’s particular relationship with a personal item – I have chosen to look at wallets. We’ll be using Design Thinking methods to examine the human aspects of the product and how people relate to it, use it, and feel about it. To kick things off before starting to …
Personal & Particular – people’s relationship with their wallet Read More »
