1. What did you learn about we are doing in this studio for the semester? Did anything stand out as something that you like/dislike?

I have learned that we will be working with middle school children in tackling with environmental issues for Earth Day for which we will be involving different sets of tools, all the way from physical computing to augmented/virtual reality and co-designing solutions with the children to design and develop proposed solutions in the forms of an MVP-grade solution.

So far there is not that much that I can tell that I like or dislike, I’ll need to learn a bit more about what we will be doing. There is also the question of what our roles will be, whether the facilitators for what the kids will ideate and to what degree will the kids have to take over the workflow.

There are some parts that are quite interesting and I do not quite exactly know about, such as the virtual learning space as I comprehended it. Is it a virtual space in which we will be interacting with the children? That would be kinda cool but I didn’t know the technology was here yet, to be in an interactive world and actively create prototypes within such world (except for people going crazy in building computers in minecraft etc.)

There is also the question of how does the Design Thinking pitch into this project, how strict it will be and how structured it might become, I’m referring more in relation to the time spent on each component of the UCD Process, all the way from research to prototyping. Despite it is an iterative process, how much time should be spent on researching the topic? And then once the ideation takes place, how will that impact the prototyping so that all the stakeholders are happy with the MVP?

2. What did you learn about Design Thinking?  – Julie

I recall design thinking as a process, researching another person’s feelings in multiple steps by the use of an interview about a specific subject, extracting the more distinct: obvious, tacit and latent knowledge, in order to rapidly come up with potential solutions via sketching and storyboarding, eventually leading to the prototyping phase with the use of provided set of tools and materials.

What in a way was new for me, was the speed with which all these steps were executed and despite the very tight timeframe, an appropriate solution was generated that suited not only my interviewee but also at least one other person in the class, who knew exactly what I have created based on my description and demonstration of a very low-fidelity prototype/mockup of the actual solution.

Regardless, I know Design Thinking as a powerful tool to create solutions that are just simply going to be useful for the end user, whether it’s just the designer who’s driving the process or if it takes places in some configuration ie. by co-design etc.