This section covers the first project for the Design Thinking course, which investigated peoples’ relationship with their wallet.
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 …
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 »
