#dsgn341

[rodriguez-341fall2019-blog]

For this week’s blog post I felt that it Design Thinking in a meeting stood out to me. We visited a design firm in Portland and got to learn about a case study they did. They use design thinking in their meeting to help accomplish a task. For example, before meeting with a client they send out a form that the potential client fills out which gives the design firm an insight on who they will be meeting. This allows them to create a connection with their potential client. From then they proceed with setting a frame on what the meeting will entail. Sometimes it involves figuring out the persona of a company or creating a plan. Then they creatively design some concepts for their client and put their work to the test. 

[alexia-thomas99-blog]

This week in class we talked about our up coming project. We are making a creative brief that another team in the class will take on after we have made it. It is important to hit peoples pain points when doing any project, to get solid answers out of people. People get so caught up in what something is or isn't, it blocks they're creativity, so by just thinking “box” > box, taking the blinders off, so you can really be creative, they do the same thing with answers, that they forget they're are asking the wring questions. When handing your work off to someone else to finish, it is something that is supposed to feel good, that you almost don't want to give up, but it also feels like a gift to them.

[alexia-thomas99-blog]

Alexia Thomas

DSGN 341 12pm

Blog Post #1: April 8th

Empathy

This past week we learned the 5 steps of the design thinking process. Starting with empathy, define, ideate, prototype, and test. Empathy was something that has stuck with me through out my week, it is something I feel not a lot people, including myself, think about much anymore, in life and creating. I am super excited for the rest of class and what else we are going to be doing, being able to learn to connect with people, and how to do that in a meaningful way, and being able to design something that they did not know they even needed.

[jason-amar-dsgn341-blog]

Reflection (Design Challenge 2)

I think that my understanding of coming up with ideas wasn’t changed much after this project than it was after the first design challenge because this felt like much of the same after completing the first project. The one thing that really helped me was having Ryan come in to lead the visual workshop. That really opened my eyes to the simplicity of drawing to convey ideas, and while I don’t think that I will ever prefer drawings over words, this definitely helped bridge the gap for me personally.

My ‘aha’ moment of this project came when we were going from putting individual parts of our ideas on the notecards and then we were using those to storyboard the process. Before even moving to the storyboarding process, Maseo and I had already started to draw arrows between the index cards indicating how different parts would function together, and I think that was the moment we really started to work like design thinkers in this challenge.

The most challenging part of this project for me was the actual parameters of the pop up shop. I understand that the point of the project is to simulate the specific details that designers face in the real world, but it seemed unrealistic to me to have a $1000 budget and only focus on one class from the beginning. I think that we would’ve had a better brainstorming session if we started a lot bigger, and worked the specific parameters in later.

[jason-amar-dsgn341-blog]

Design Challenge 2

This project was a bit more challenging for me than the first design challenge. I’m still not sure what created that issue, whether it was the group not buying in, getting worn out over the course of the term, or not understanding what the goals of the pop up were supposed to be, but we persevered regardless. After creating our list of pains and gains, it was clear that we had no direction, just a general list of what annoys us in school (which is a pretty easy list to create). It was the storyboarding activity that really helped us determine how we wanted students to be able to use the pop up design shop for their interior design class project. At that point in the project, I think that it would’ve been beneficial to gather more data from actual interior design students and see if the process we created would be of interest to them, but we weren’t able to just because of time restraints. Overall, I think that this project would’ve been a lot more beneficial if it was run over at least 4 weeks with extensive research being a larger part of the rubric. 

[jason-amar-dsgn341-blog]

Design Sprint 2

In the second design sprint, we had to create the ideal wallet for our partner. At first I really struggled with this because it’s hard to pitch change to someone especially at that base level like a wallet. The interviews definitely made the process a bit easier and it was interesting to try to get in someone else’s head and think about what they might need to make their life easier.

[jason-amar-dsgn341-blog]

Design Sprint 1

In the first design sprint, we were tasked to combine the two words on our forehead, and we had ‘apple’ and money’. After brainstorming ways to combine those two things into a product or service, we arrived at the idea of a meal subscription service that featured different apples in each basket to make different meals or desserts.