From Erin Gibbs’s presentation last week, I was really inspired by the process Erin set out throughout courses of her projects. It was really a good lesson for me to see how Erin and her team collaborate and distribute parts of projects into small sections, so each and everyone could use their strengths to improve upon the overall team project. I also really like how Erin could capture the trend of her industry so she gets a good grasp of what she is going to design about.

Design & Thinking documentary actually surprised me for how design thinking could be applied to a boarder fields other than just design field particularly. Seeing how companies, doing different jobs, using the system of design thinking appears really interesting to me. Design Thinking, and how companies apply it, doesn’t necessarily have to be a linear process. Some companies just focus on just one step of the whole process, or even jumping from one step to another without any orders. Personally, I’m really into what Stephen Gibbs states in The Cook. His company persuades people into cooking and making food from all ingredients. Initially, people are shy to participate, but as time builds up during cooking sessions, people start to cook and find interest in cooking. This is to me, is the empathize phase in the Design Process, combined with a part of prototype. The cooking is an ice-breaker for people (empathize), and the outcome turning out successfully is the result of doing it over and over again (prototype). Hence, my thought that Design Thinking was a linear process has been completely changed and I think from this point on, I will focus on just one phase of Design Thinking.

The reading talks about how design thinking could be incorporated in solving problems for multiple companies such as IBM, SkiftX and Ford. Design Thinking to what IDEO believes, is a cluster of different steps that are divided into 5 phases: Empathize, Ideate, Define, Prototype and Test. These phases are not linear and can loop over and over when applicable. One could use different approach, or even different terms while solving their problems. There are multiple examples of how companies like IBM applies design thinking into their company. In particular, they use the “Loop”, which includes: Observe, Reflect and Make for their business model. This model helps employees treat themselves as the end-users and experience the products they make as their customers. When coming together, they can give concrete ideas on the product.

I feel this is one of the thing we could take away from the example. While in the process of preparing for the grad show, we should consider ourselves as the attendees. We should see how we could come up with something innovative, creative and impressive for the grad show, that might actually attract people, not just displaying our work to promote ourselves.

After watching Jen’s talk on Design Thinking and Barnfield’s perspectives that tend to contradict with her points, I feel like both of them have made really good points in their own words.

In Barnfield’s first point arguing on Jen’s claim about Design Thinking being nothing more than Post-It Notes and Hexagons, I totally agree with him. Barnfield has made a clear argument saying whether it is Design Thinking or not, every designer has to go through the process of criticism. Without criticism, we all acknowledge that we could never be able to proceed further in our career.

Moving forward to Jen’s second point, claiming that during the process of Design Thinking, critiquing is subtracted completely from it. Nonetheless, Barnfield goes against this point saying critiquing in Design Thinking is now embedded by making assumptions on the end-user experience about the design. I, again, agree with Bernfield’s claim on this. Receiving ideas from your fellow colleagues doesn’t necessarily prove to be a bad thing in the design process, but quite subjective in my opinion. As Barnfield states in his article, your work could never avoid biases from the audience, nonetheless, it’s better to receive outsider’s perspectives on your work than those who are close to you. It proves to be more objective.

Jen’s last point focuses on the fact that it is “messiness”, which metaphorically means “displaying your work”, that drives a successful design project. And messiness does not play a part in the process of Design Thinking. It seems in Bernfield’s article, he misinterprets the point where Jen demonstrates on messiness, stating Jen assumes those who seek creativity need to be messy in order to be innovative. What Jen really means to say is, end-users need to see evidence of how a project or a product comes to be, how the designer/engineer/scientist develops his ideas to the outcome.

In conclusion, Jen and Bernfield have both made really good points on whether Design Thinking is really needed to develop a completed concept. From this, I am able to see both what Design Thinking could bring to the table and what it couldn’t to apply to my future design career.