Category: Design Thinking Notecards

This week, I learned a lot about prototypes and their benefits. Depending on your product, the prototype you use can come in many different formats, but any prototype you make will be able to give you a lot of insight into your design. They can be used to see how users might interact with or interpret your designs, and then they can give you feedback about aspects they like or questions, ideas, or suggestions that they might have. One quote from IDEO that stood out to me was, “If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a prototype is worth a thousand meetings.” This really shows that prototypes can give you unique insights – and lots of them!

Something that stood out to me this week was that design is always changing and evolving. Just like art is more meaningful when you understand the context it was created in, design is influenced by the culture and context it is created in as well.

This week, what stood out to me was realizing how important the relationship between the designer and the user really is. Designers ultimately have so much control over how their product is received. In order to deliver the best product for their consumer, designers can use personas, prototypes, storyboards, and a myriad of other approaches to get to know what the user really wants. Another great way to do this is to partner with the users themselves and involve them in the design process, as seen in some of our resources this week like the Umpqua Bank case study and the Mobius Motors vehicle designed by Joel Jackson.

A big takeaway I got from the readings this week was the idea that designers need to be able to think outside the box and try new things without fear of judgement – either judgement from others or even from themselves! There are strategies that can help you to think creatively, like changing the frame of view, brainstorming many ideas, and trying out crazy ideas even if you’re not sure they will succeed…!

A theme that stood out to me this week was that designers have the ability to reflect their values, passions, and ideas into their work. Since design is not limited to a certain field, there is so much room for designers to think outside the box and showcase what they want the rest of the world to understand about the way they think. In addition to this, it is important to keep an open mind and be willing to learn and work with others so that your knowledge can grow across multiple cultures, worldviews, and disciplines. These, along with other ideas, are illustrated in my notecards this week. Note: I forgot to print out one of my images…!! I am sad…

Before this week, I had never considered the phrase “design thinking”, but as I’m learning more and more about it, I’m finding out just how useful it is. Design thinking isn’t just something that can be applied to product design – you can use its principles while you’re managing a business, solving a problem, learning a new skill, or simply trying to figure out what you want to do with your life…! A big part of design thinking relies on bouncing between steps and being able to go back, revise, improve, and come up with totally new or inventive ideas. I’ve illustrated this thought, along with seven others that struck me, on the note cards shown below.