DESIGN THINKING DIARIES #1
The main reason why KU Global Aid exists is to produce effective and sustainable projects as solutions to contemporary challenges. Therefore, a guide for innovation and creativity is a necessity for our team, and we decided to attend a training about design thinking. We practiced an accelerated but sufficient Design Thinking workshop at the beginning of the year via Zoom. This allowed us to experience the process directly.
Let us inform you about what design thinking is; it is a process that aims to use the designer approach while understanding and solving complex issues. Discovering, designing, and delivering are the keywords that one should focus on in order to start a brand-new design thinking process. We as Koc University Global Aid first aimed to discover and specify the main issues that can be categorized. When we designate the issues, we start the devoted, candid procedure and concentrate on solving the issues and coming up with a project. This whole process was also good for us to communicate with each other during these hard times because of Covid-19. While everyone was away from their schools, it was good to be a part of a team, make friends from the school, and have great conversations with these precious people.
The first thing that we did was to categorize some global or national problems, and we divided into groups and after dividing into groups of 8 to 12 people, had completed the organization of the interview outputs by using online tools (Mural). We started to do interviews with people about the topics which were given to each one of us and asked their opinions about the issues that we are struggling with every day and also about the issues that we are trying to find a solution for. While we were doing the interviews, we didn’t only focus on the opinions of people, but we were also interested in the problems that they experienced in their own lives. Then we get insights from these interviews. After finishing the interviews, we started to talk about these insights that we learn from the people. But while explaining the insights we didn’t divide into groups, as a whole, we came together, and then we shared our insights. It is because we thought that it would be more helpful for everyone to know more about the different topics that we are focusing on and make connections with each other.
Design Thinking is a process of getting the opinions of everyone involved and harmonizing them with each other. The people whom we get insights from, have different ages and they have different ethnicities. We have been mindful of diversity in terms of the people whose insights we get. The main reason why we did such a thing is that we wanted to get as many as insights we can, to learn more from people who are of different ages, and to learn more about the issues of different cultures and ethnicities. As we gained as many insights as we could, we started to see opposing thoughts that allowed us to create more ideas.
The most creative and probably the most fun part of the design thinking process was the part where we started brainstorming. After dividing main problems into subproblems and categorizing them, we had general and unifying topics to guide our thoughts. We even made our creativity talk as much as we could, knowing that the more we go beyond the limits, the newer ideas we will come up with. It was very important for us to be as free as possible in the first step because it will help the creativity flow. We have expanded the borders and created a lot of different ideas. Now the turn was slowly getting deeper for a few selective ones. Discussions on the subproblems gave us a better understanding of the insights and the problem itself. Then, we began to eliminate some subproblems one by one by voting. Meanwhile, we were continuing our discussions, so it was not a linear process. If new problems or ideas come to our minds, we continue to add them to the Mural whiteboard. This lasted until we were convinced that we narrowed our boundaries enough.
After sharing the insights and processing the information that we got from them, we decided to divide into three main groups; thus, we could work on different topics at the same time and get the benefit out of our teamwork. After voting on the subject that each of us wanted to work on and the chosen topics were there for us to carry out the design thinking process: ‘Environment’ ‘Gender Inequality’ and ‘Human Rights’. After dividing into groups, we analyze the insights that our friends came up with at their interviews. Talking about the interviews, the different aspects of them to think about, the little details that may be important, and every other aspect that our imagination and thoughts allowed us to examine, we shared. One subject led to another, one topic reminded us of another related problem and that just made us more interested and invested in what we do, which kept us motivated during the new step in the design thinking process: Starting to diverge and generating the options.
When we started diverging, we started writing the problems that we came up with as much as we could, ‘was it logical?’ or ‘was it suitable to the subject?’ -well we did not care. We just started writing what came into our minds. Relevant or irrelevant, controversial, or agreeable we just narrated our ideas for minutes. At the end of the process, we realized that just a couple of insights made us generate so many concepts. Being a part of a team where nobody tends to hurt or judge each other, we were not ashamed or shy about our way of thinking. When it was the end of our meeting, there were lots and lots of thoughts, insights, and discoveries that would be worked on in our next meeting…
By Hanım, Berfin, and Gülay
