Design Thinking

I've been thinking a lot about design lately. My grad program is a Masters of Design, after all! We won't graduate as "designers", like my interior-, environmental-, graphic-, etc design friends. We'll be the sorts of people who apply design principles to non-traditional design situations. Like what, I hear you ask? Like, policy, business processes, business models. Yeah, stuff like that.

I entered the program with a grand view of crafting a new cultural policy for the 21st century. Lofty eh? It didn't take me long to figure out that I could very well design a cultural policy for my own little island, but that was not likely to happen here in Canada. Kinda reminds me when we were trying to craft an arts policy for Canada and ended up with an arts policy for a Branch, okay, a sector, if you really want to split hairs.

One of our first assignments was a design thinking challenge. Design thinking is what designers do naturally. Rather than seeing a problem and figuring out how to fix it, you seek to understand the context, figure out what's going on and what the problem actually is (coz it's not always what you thought it was) and then you come up with a whack of possible ways to solve it. Finally you work with the best solution that fits the circumstances. Our assignment was to find an innovation in the context of the H1N1 pandemic. So we had to understand the context (what is H1N1 and its implications for Toronto?), find a problem waiting for a solution, explore a whole bunch of ways to solve that problem and pick the best one. Finally, we had to prove how it would either save lives, save money or make money.

Fast Company has a nice article on design thinking.

It was a challenge but a good one. We were a group of people who'd never worked together before and didn't know each other at all. We had our bumps along the way. What do you expect from a group of strangers grappling with a working process that was new to most of us and counter-intuitive to some?

Apart from teaching us about design thinking, the assignment taught us a lot about our classmates: how they think, problem solve and collaborate.