According to Lucky Kimbell (2011), she recognises that design thinking can be viewed as a ‘cognitive style’ in how individuals think, perceive and remember information. Heading into this paper, we learn new tools and theories of design thinking and task to apply them to a group project, with a brief given by Auckland City: Emergency Management. The theme we chose from them was on ‘Building Social Capital’ in terms of emergency management. Our aim was to successfully come up with a new solution to satisfy the unmet needs of social capital while collaborating with my group members and Auckland City. The following essay will outline the key theoretical design concepts or practices I learnt in our design thinking project, a significant experience I had, and key qualities or characteristics associated with effective designers that I learn and apply to our project. While linking all these aspects of our design process to design thinking literature provided to try better understand the complex mindset of design thinking.
‘Social Capital is not a well-known term to most people as they don’t fully grasp the concept of it, In Mackesy and Marshall (2017) reading, social capital is described as building relationships, connections, trust and respect among individuals.In our applied group project, our opportunity statement focuses on the demographics of university students as our group believer that building connections from an early stage will build enough trust and understanding among them in the future, especially in an emergency. One of the key theoretical design practice we applied to our applied project was the use of convergent and divergent thinking. Convergence thinking does contribute a significant amount to our project because it enables us to look into aspects we have never thought before like the viability and feasibility of our ideas in achieving our aim of the project. This can be supported by Razzouk and Shute (2012) literature on the convergence phase “Narrowing a problem entails comparing two or more ideas and then selecting the solutions based on specific and relevant goal criteria". However, I found this phase to be incompetent without the divergence phase as it is a prerequisite for effective convergence thinking which is why our group focus a lot in the divergent thinking of this project as we kept coming back to design thinking in terms of generating ideas through the tools we learn. In terms of divergent thinking, the key tools that help me gain deeper insights are from the ‘Discover’ Phase where this reading states this is an expansive and exploratory phase where a wide pool of possibilities and opportunities are evaluated. ‘Observation’ and ‘Empathy Mapping’ were some of the design tools from this phase mentioned in this reading that I had to consistently use throughout this applied project. Observation is an ethnographic method tool use to watch and learn about people behaviour, mannerism and actions in public in gaining meaningful insight. An example is when I conducted direct observation at St Paul Church where a group of international and domestic students gather to get free lunch and network on Wednesdays, as well as an Asian cultural night event where international students from Asia come to play Asian games together. By employing the Empathy Mapping tool along with direct observation really help us dig deeper into the identification of unmet needs to reveal unrealised opportunities for us. Although the tools were useful, most of the data gathered through these tools were based on assumption and our own subjectivity instead of factual insights and needs directly from the individuals. Fortunately, this can be supported by Kimbell’s reading where she states that “design professionals have an episodic way of approaching their work; they rely on hunches and presupposition, not just facts.”Hence why the concept and development of empathy play a vital role in our applied project on social capital; I guess that’s why they call it empathy mapping as a tool that fully utilises the concept of empathy. All in all, I found divergent thinking tools more effective in developing empathy and knowledge of social capital.
A significant experience we had with our applied group project was an interview with Cissy Rock and her contribution to communities and Local Government as a social mentor. Throughout the interview, Cissy discusses her personal experiences and challenges in regards to building social capital. She emphases how Empathy was a key quality to utilise in her job in order to better understand communities and build bonds. Empathy is a well-known design concept used not only for building social capital but across all human-centred problems. Mackesy and Marshall (2017) contend that empathy is the “ability to understand and share the feelings of another”; as well as “fuels connections and understanding” (p. 6). Cissy highlights developing trust takes time and how diversity among people is hard to bridge with many different cultural backgrounds being taken into consideration when putting them together to network. This design concept is fundamental to building trust and relationships that we have to integrate into our self to successfully progress in this applied project.Moreover, a finding I gathered from the interview was as Cissy was talking about the challenges and troubles she faces as a social mentor, she never let these issues get to her and preserve through these challenges through her passion to help and build social capital. This is evident in how she carries herself and talk about her experiences with working with communities as she is very passionate about her job and that passion is what keeps her determined to achieve her goals. I even noticed the many connections she has mentioned during the interview in order for her to get things done or even organize events that contribute to social capital has a lot to do with social networking. I gather that networking is a skill that needs to be picked not only by those in the design but also those in many other fields to benefit them in the near future. Cissy also brought up how building social capital is no easy process as she has faced challenges working as a social mentor. For instance, she explains in one of her projects in building social capital on a larger scale, collaborating with multiple people lead to a clash of opinions that leads to the dilution of the goal to the project, as well as how the person in charge of funding seems to try to take control of the whole project. According to Razzouk and Shute (2012), collaboration is another key concept vital to design thinking in order to “communicate across disciplines and work with other people” (p. 336). Even though this is a vital concept for designers to have, we failed to integrate this concept into our applied design project. The dynamics of my group are very poor with as it felt like it was a ‘two-man project’ instead of a group of four working together. One of them did not contribute till the last few weeks of the project submission whereas the other member did not communicate with us or made time to attend group meetings; collaboration did not work for me in this project due to conflict and miscommunication. Overall, the interview with Cissy was an experience that taught me the importance of empathy, collaboration, passion and social networking.
Furthermore, throughout this design thinking journey it was indeed a challenge as it is “supposed to be is not well understood, either by the public or those who lay claim to practice it (Kimbell, 2011, p. 288) as it did take me a while to understand the whole process including the tools and concepts taught to us. I did identify the key characteristics and qualities that associated with effective designers using Tim Brown (2008) reading such as empathy, collaboration, experimentalism, optimism, and integrative learning. I have picked up on the importance is empathy and collaboration in my previous paragraph and apply them to my project. I managed to integrate optimism as I had challenges that hinder my thought process and issues with group dynamics, I did not let that hinder me from finding solutions to solve the issues at hand and deliver my applied project in time completed. Unfortunately, I did not demonstrate the key characteristics of experimentalism and integrative learning due to the time constraints in my design process and other responsibilities I had with other papers in my degree. My group and I were open to attempting all the design tools and applying them to our applied design project. Even though all the design tools contributed a lot to the overall applied project, there were some tools that proved to be more effective than others that relate to our theme of building social capital. The tools in the Discover phase were the most effective in collecting information and developing empathy as well as the tools from the Ideate phase such as Imposing Constraints and Lotus Blossoming help branch out our ideas and narrowing them down in terms of viability and feasibility. The tools in the Interpret phase such as Personas and POVs were more effective in terms of gaining deeper insight and unmet needs of our demographic target, university students. If I were to restart this project all over again, I would have explored more on Knowledge Gathering as we did not do much research online and case studies on social capital and the effectiveness of social capital from other parts of the globe. I also would have like to invest more in the Rapid-fire prototyping tool since we're short on time to test out our idea to its fullest potential. “Prototyping doesn’t have to be complex and expensive” as it’s a tool to “generate useful feedback and evolve our ideas” even further (Brown, 2008, p. 87). These key qualities associated with a designer as well as the design tool I will benefit me in future design-related projects
In conclusion, this personal reflections essay presents my journey throughout this design thinking practice. Divergence and convergence thinking were the key concepts and practices that I applied to my project. The interview with Cissy Rock provided me with findings of key qualities to a designer and elaborated further in the third paragraph followed by the revelation of doing more knowledge gathering and prioritise more time in prototyping. It has been a challenging yet experience throughout this paper.