Three things I learned at a d.school class

I took one d.school class-Play Innovation this quarter and I learned a lot from it. Compared to classes like ME310, d.school class projects are not quite engineered. Actually sometimes their prototypes look pretty sloppy. But I truly believe that smaller and a little more projects are ideal to practice design thinking.

Basically I learned three things at that class.

1 Environment is very important.

This class created a very SAFE environment for creation, which means besides the universal phrase in d.school classes "I wish, I like", it also encourages students to push the limit of crazy ideas. No one will be blamed for any idea. The results turned out to be fabulous. For all of the three small projects, there are some truly awesome ideas. I do believe this is working, and I began to think how do I create a safe environment for myself to be creative. Choosing the environment around me is definitely one choice. Besides that, I also need to expand my mind to accept more things, to appreciate different angles, to push the limit of my imagination.

2 Have clear time line at the beginning makes things going much smoother.

Three small projects, I did an experiment. The one we had the least time turned out to be the most efficient, the one we had a lot of time was in a hurry at the last minute. It is very obvious that with the one we had shorter time, we made a clear time line right after class and carried it out after that. But for the other one, we didn't do that because we thought we had plenty of time. Having clear time line and goal do help on productivity. Even if it doesn't turn out to be completely achieved, we should still make the plan early.

3 Have fun, relax, and trust the process and then good ideas will show up.

Engineering students are not comfortable when facing ambiguity generally. They usually tend to have some clear guideline to follow. Once they don't, they will create one for them to follow even if it is not the right one. For a typical design thinking process, I think we need to really relax and trust the process, trust it will all work out OK. It is very clear that some students they always have good ideas, I think that is because they had fun there and followed process to explore, and converge at a certain point. For those very engineering thinking student, their projects are usually well made but with less value-they didn't explore the space enough before getting their hands dirty to make prototypes.