Ques1 ) What were you thinking and feeling about the course?

Before having started the course on Design Thinking and Innovation I had
spoken to a few friends who had already completed the course and with the
kind of experience they shared, I knew that these were going to be some very
interesting classes. The main reason being you actually get an experience of
trying to solve an already existing problem along with a group of other people,
brainstorming and iterating through every step of the process and coming up
with a solution that you as a team believe would be best for the problem in
hand. The important part for me before coming to the course was to be able to
solve problems in a creative and innovative way.
I had a basic idea of what design thinking process was real-life but this was
going to be an opportunity to learn the in-depth details of the entire process.
With the kind of buzz that we have around design thinking these days, it got
me to develop an interest in learning about the real-life process._
However I would say that at the beginning of the course I wasn’t very keen on
learning the theory aspect of it, rather what I had in mind was being practically
able to implement the idea of design thinking around a real-life problem. This
was probably a misconception at my end that the theory part would not be
important, which I realized later during the course, where we were able to
follow the approach of design thinking in our implementation only using the
aspects we had learned in class.
When I saw the videos of real-life solutions which were being implemented to
solve real-life problems, that gave me the energy and passion to come up with
similar ideas. The structure of design thinking enables us to move forward in
the process of innovation, other than the usual process of spending too much
time on the problem or skipping through the various steps.

Ques 2) What was good and bad about your experience with the course?
The overall experience of the Design Thinking course was pretty good. It
allowed us to think in a different way and also take an innovative approach
towards solving a problem. During the initial part of the course we as a group
were finding it hard to define a problem statement and had a very broad
overview of what we actually wanted to do, but that was to change with the
field visit we had to do. As we went out and observed, we were able to
understand the problem, able to relate with it and in the end, also were able to
pinpoint a problem that we wanted to work on and find a solution to. That
probably was the most important part of our course because being able to
define a problem statement eventually decides how successful the idea would
be.
To start with, there were many good aspects such as teamwork, brainstorming,
iterations, putting ideas into chart paper and working on those ideas so as to
choose the best one. Also, the videos shown during the duration of the course
allowed us to think in a particular direction. The videos also made me realize
that the problem that you need to work on does not need to be a very big one,
you can also work on a smaller problem but take an innovative approach and
make a big impact.
Although there could have been a few things that could still be worked on.
Firstly interaction with some of the industry experts who had earlier worked on
some design thinking problem would have helped us. Secondly, the notes
distributed can be compiled as a handbook for better organization and
management. Also sometimes it becomes difficult to be able to come up with a
solution and a prototype in a short duration, so the classes can be extended for
some more duration of time to give a better understanding and proper
implementation of the projects by the students.

Ques 3) What learnings could you draw out of this course?

The entire course was an experience that gave us an opportunity to learn a lot
from. To begin with, the ability to be able to recognize a problem statement
becomes a very important part of the process. The Design Thinking process
comprises five steps that empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and testing. To
be able to implement each step with the entire group and multiple iterations
was really helpful. I realized that it is not necessary that your first solution
would always be the correct one and that you would only be able to come to a
final solution after a lot of iterations and changes.
For example, the activity of designing the perfect wallet for our partners really
helped to understand how we make false assumptions about other people’s
needs and behaviors. The activity also helped us understand the various level
of empathizing and the learnings from the same.
There was much to learn from this design thinking course that we attended.
We learned about how to think about a problem statement and zero down on
a real-life problem statement solution of which could have a real impact on
society. We also learned about how to get inspiration from other ideas in the
world. This was done through in house discussions and watching videos of
other people designing their ideas into reality. I learned to be empathetic to a
person’s problems through the interview that I conducted with my team
members and gathering valuable insights from them. I understood that to
know a person and his/her problems you first need to establish a rapport with
him/her, then only they open up to express. their problems at a deeper level
which can give you insights into the solution. I learned to work in team and
understood team bonding, brainstorming, ideation, feedback regarding the
work done. Also I learned that diversity is very important and my team was a
very diverse team regarding education and experience background. Drawing
an empathy map revealed great insights so as to how the user felt, what did
the user think about, what did the user say, what did the user do.
To conclude the course, we can say that it is important to embrace the failures
that we face during the process as they are a part of the learning. Design
Thinking is all about learning from the previous approach.

Ques 4) What else could you have done differently in this course?
The whole DTI course was very well made and presented. The guidelines
provided were clear and when followed gave desirable results. It was good
learning for all of us. It challenged us to think like real innovators going
towards a problem stepwise. There were just a few things that could be done
differently during the course of action. Firstly, if we would have received a
coursepack or some kind of booklet containing all the details and write up
information about the course we could have referenced it again and again in
the course of our field visits and interviews. That would also have helped us in
the future when we are working on similar projects and stuck in a step.
Secondly, if the course would have been spaced to a duration of near to two
months, we would have got an ample amount of time to go in the field to
reach out to a larger audience and gain deeper insights into the subject matter.
Thirdly, we would have appreciated if someone from the industry would have
come for a guest lecture, a person who uses design thinking on a daily basis
either in professional or personal front and how it has brought efficiency in the
working pattern.
Apart from all these things, the course of Design Thinking and Innovation, in
my words, was a complete success. Success is subjective and in my terms
success of a course happens when the learning is thorough and it leaves an
impression on the student where he is encouraged to use the learnings in the
future. And in all these aspects, this course had a lot of taking aways and is
surely a process that we will use in future prospects.

Ques 5) How do you plan to use the DT skill in your personal and
professional life?

The design thinking course presented to us was a very structured course that
had many take away to learn and use them in a professional and personal
front. The basic structure of Design thinking is looking out the problem
affecting a group or an individual, it can be the person itself, and going for a
solution in a structured manner following Empathy, Define, Ideation, Prototype
and Testing elements of the course. The biggest learning for me during this
course in professional life would be to remember that success cannot be
achieved in the first try. You always have to be persistent in your approach and
learning from your mistakes and improving on them becomes the key to
success. During the course, while trying to come up with a solution we also
faced issues at different levels but we also realized that this was part of the
process and that we needed to learn from these issues. At times during our
professional careers, we will also face situations where we need to follow a
structured approach. In such scenarios design thinking process can be followed
for a better understanding and implementation.
For personal life, design thinking can be used to redefine an individual. It can
help to collaborate with each other, it can increase creativity, it can be used in
solving everyday problems, as well as solving business problems in the future.
Also, we can use this in helping other people. It has engrained a sense of
empathy inside us to understand the other person and his/her problems. The
process of iterative ideation has helped us in thinking of new and different
ideas and out of the box thinking that will help us in gaining competitive
advantage. The defining stage has taught us on how to narrow down a
problem statement so that it can help us in finding solutions easily and in a
more precise manner.

Ques 6) What happened during the course?

Design thinking is a process which starts with empathy for customers, and the
practitioners try to come up with insights in order to define the main problem
in the area so as to know what it is working towards, then the practitioner
ideate to come up with a number of different possibilities by brainstorming
and related activities, a prototype is constructed which is used to display the
proposed idea and test the best ideas by involving end-users or customers. The
practitioner can be an individual as well as a team and they have to revisit
steps throughout the process, learning, adapting and iterating as they move
ahead with the decision thinking.
During our course on Design Thinking and Innovation it was spread across 5
Stages of Empathy, Define, Ideation, Prototype, and Test. We were divided into
groups to define the practitioner of the course as a team. Group members
were allowed to come up with creative names for the teams and interact with
each other in order to induce familiarity. Along with the theory presentations,
we were also shown videos of various inventors, their path towards the
inventions that helped a lot of people and how they were able to come up with
the idea for the invention. This helped us in creating a connection with the
design thinkers. We were conditioned to go in the field to look out how the
general mass is getting affected by various problems and how can we make
their life easier. For our group, we found that the region of Ghaziabad has a
lack of driving sense which was evident from the frequent accidents we
witnessed in the region surrounding our institute only which resulted in injury
many times. Every team was free to choose the area for their workshop project
by looking into the problems faced daily by a group of individuals or problems
that affects a larger population. After recognizing a problem area, further
insights were drawn from primary and secondary research so as to narrow
down to a single problem statement. This was possible by taking into
consideration what different stakeholders related to our problem region think.
As the course proceeded, after the ideation was narrowed down to the extent
that application was possible, the teams developed a model of their thinking
and the problem they are aiming to solve. The freedom of innovation in the
prototypes lead to various free flows of ideas. Now the last step was to test the
prototype in the field with our end-users and get to know their opinions about
the design change or the new innovation and how eager are they to adopt the
new innovation. Here we needed to be flexible with new insights or likes and
dislikes of our product/offering that we can incorporate in the final design.
Design thinking helps to discover methods for making sense of design research,
including empathy maps and experience maps. Its main agenda is to provide a
solution-based approach towards solving any problem. Overall, the course that
seemed to be challenging but later turned out to be easy as the team dynamics
improved and we were able to use the tools mentioned in the course with
ease.