I knew after walking into the Custom Insights for Innovation classroom on the first day that this was not going to be your conventional college course. My thoughts were proven correct early in the semester when we started to work on a Design Thinking Boot camp, a hands on experience and test over a multi-class period. It incorporated the Design Thinking Framework and personal stories from our partners so that we may identify the problem and find ways to solve that problem.
My partners story involved trying to navigate an unfamiliar major cities public transportation system with a low phone battery and nothing but a screenshot of the route to get him through. Luckily he found his way, but I am sure many others have had similar experiences. As someone who is taking Entrepreneur classes for the concentration, this assignment, while arranged different than anything I have done before, was right up my alley. So I knew the next step was to identify the specific problem. But this was more challenging because there were many little problems that added to his overall problem.
The feedback stage before generating ideas was crucial and certainly aided me with more personal information I needed to develop an idea around. I was able to then identify at least four possible solutions that tried to solve as many of the issues as possible. When discussing them, my partner really liked the one idea, so that is the one I chose to move forward with.
What I really liked about the boot camp is the one-on-one attention to detail it provided through the entire process. All of my experiencing up to this point for similar exercises has certainly been different. Instead of identifying a possible problem and going out to validate that problem with a solution, we literally just started with personal stories related to our phones and going from there. But to remain one-on-one for the duration of the development was definitely the biggest difference. It allowed the individual with a problem to be part of basically every step of development, keeping the developer in check in case they tried to stray away from the original problem. This is important because naturally the developer is going to find a multitude of different ways to advance an idea to become more desirable, so having the original person’s feedback on how it could meet their specific needs is crucial. I feel like the overall exercise shows perfectly how important it is sometimes to focus on an individuals specific problem and finding a solution perfectly suited for them instead of trying to find a solution that would fulfill the greatest number of people with that possible problem. That will all come later, but finding that specific problem and solution without worrying if it is completely feasible definitely opens the door for new concepts and ideas never thought of before.