My Design Thinking Experience.
By: Cindy Bajracharya
Tags: New Concept, Prototyping, Design Thinking Exercise, A Learning Experience

Hearing the word design thinking itself confused me at first sight. however, it excited me because I thought oh well I get to learn designing after all. you see, I always wanted to learn something related to designing whether it was interior or fashion. the day we began our classes I was surprised to understand what ‘design thinking studio’ course actually meant. this course actually made me reflect on how far our world has come. designing was not limited to drawings and moldings anymore, it was now improvised to design the way we think and shape our ideas and how we put them into action. this really excited me to be very honest because this was something new, something out of theories, something creative and explorative.

When we started with learning about the 5 important steps of design thinking studio keeping in mind the balance of these 3 things; desirability, feasibility, and viability in each step and thought that we process. this is where I learned how important it is to remind ourselves to think in a SMART way. To begin with when we were assigned with a group and a sector to work with, I was not as comfortable since i was assigned into a group of strangers and a sector i never was interested it and we were told that we will be having design challenges step by step where we will imply everything we learn. We started with empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping and testing.

When we started enculcating these steps into our challenge and we were given the sector of agriculture, we started to realize how much of thought process goes into small details such as even understanding the user’s story, perspective, problems, how the user is moving while explaining the problem and so on. But above all we realize how much of importance these small details hold and hid. Hid because we discovered a lot of insights and stories within those details itself. In addition, we got to learn various new ideas, information and issues of the sector that represents our country itself. the most difficult part was to define one main problem by discovering it from the various stories we listened to. along with this we worked as a team to collect and analyse our ideas to move on to making a prototyping. however, due to the on going pandemic we could not build a realistic prototype and try out actual testing.

Moving on, out of all this the major experience was to learn new techniques, concepts and challenges of developing or creating a product or service. for me it was a whole new idea to be thinking of the problem first when in actual i already had a solution in my head. all of these little things and steps we took and at last looking back makes me see of how much we as youths can contribute if we try. all of our ideas, concepts and prototypes actually have the potential to be further polished and executed for real. I guess we would have never made it this far with our idea or even thought of these solutions if it was not for our challenge. It pushed us to think out of the box but staying empathetic and realistic and presenting a feasible solution and its prototype. this experience as whole was challenging yes, yet it gave me a huge boost to be confident with my ideas and to not be afraid to try out new things. This experience made me gain many new and sustainable concepts and ways I can create products and services in the future. Design Thinking Studio is a concept much needed for today’s youths to realize their ideas are the potential solution and building lock for the community around them.