It was a super cool and interactive workshop with Terry and Joshua from Stanford d.school and Dan from University of Nairobi. If you are a techpreneur,researcher, a designer and you did not attend then you missed out! We learnt a bunch of interesting and eye-opening things.
The workshop started off with an interactive session entitled ‘The Wallet Project’ , an immersive activity meant to give participants a full cycle through the design thinking process in as short a time as possible. The project itself gives facilitators the opportunity to touch on the fundamental values of the d.school that include:
- Human-centered design: Empathy for the person or people you are designing for, and feedback from users, is fundamental to good design.
- Experimentation and Prototyping—Prototyping is not simply a way to validate your idea; it is an integral part of your innovation process. We build to think and learn.
- A bias towards action: Design thinking is a misnomer; it is more about doing that thinking. Bias toward doing and making over thinking and meeting.
- Show don’t tell: Creating experiences, using illustrative visuals, and telling good stories communicate your vision in an impactful and meaningful way.
- Power of iteration: The reason we go through this exercise at a frantic pace is that we want people to experience a full design cycle. A person’s fluency with design thinking is a function of cycles, so we challenge participants to go through as many cycles as possible—interview twice, sketch twice, and test with your partner twice. Additionally, iterating solutions many times within a project is key to successful outcomes.
- Lack of proper roads to transport their products and services
- Lack of storage facilities and lots of food wastage
- Lack of an ordering platform to advertise and the vendors to get more traffic for their products
- Insecurity and no community policing
- No proper water and sanitation facilities
- Insufficient capital and financing for business expansion
- Point of view= user + need + insight, this is the anchor/focused challenge that grows from empathy.
- Often you could build on a bad idea and get a good one that relates to it
- Imagination! Empathy! Reframing the problem! Generate alternatives! Iterate based on feedback! Build and test!
- Fail Early, Fail often then learn from that!
- The fundamental way to test prototypes is by letting users experience them and react to as well as your perception of your users and their needs.