11/01/19 - Design thinking and introduction to the understand phase

In the rather short second session we briefly recapped what we've done in the Kick-Off session by reading the learning diaries from others and collecting pictures that describe the contents best. Here you can see the pictures that we collected and maybe you can relate them to the topics mentioned in the post before:

Afterwards our lecturer gave some input about design thinking. It can be said that it is a process that utilizes empathetic, creative, innovative and analytical skills to provide solutions to an established and understood problem. Design thinking is a new way of approach to complex problem-solving tasks, combining methods from engineering and design with the ideas from arts, social sciences and the business world. Keeping the end user in mind, this approach aims at finding creative, collaborative and human-centered solutions. All in all it includes six steps: Understand, Observe, Define point of view, Ideate, Prototype and Test, of which we will apply the first four. This is then called the 'micro-cycle'. The 'macro-cycle' is all about diverging a problem over time and step by step converging it again. However, I might need to have a closer look into that again.

When approaching the project, it is crucial for us to understand first who is the target group, why the user thinks that a solution is needed, what the user proposes as a solution, when and for how long the result is needed, where the latter is going to be used and how the solution will be implemented. Going forward, this should be elaborated from different perspectives. Respectively, the class decided on five different stakeholder groups that should be taken into closer consideration. For those groups we then started to create a so-called 'user profile canvas', which describes the person (gender, age, social environment, way of thinking, hobbies etc.), the jobs that the persona needs to do, a typical use cases (e.g. when mobility is being used and how) and the pains and gains that the current situation entails for the persona. Due to the short amount of time that was left from today’s lecture, we only finished painting our persona “The citizens” in the middle of the canvas sheet.