My journey and experience about Design thinking
When I got the course list for my 3rd semester, my eyes were attracted to this subject “Design Thinking” as the title of this subject was pretty interesting. Being a student majoring in finance I thought this subject was all about designing and sketching which I was really interested to. I knew this subject was going to be different and unique from the field I was majoring in.
In the first day of my class I was really excited and curious at the same time to know about this subject. Then our teachers started explaining about the subject starting from the title. Then I came to know what actually design thinking was. From my perception, design thinking is a practical process in which we try to understand about our users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions to prototype and test. From the first class, teachers taught us to focus more in the problems of users because it is the most important part. My first group presentation was in education sector where I got to learn the different problems our users were facing. We did empathy interviews with our users where we got to know our users better and see from their perspective as well. We also made user persona and posted it in the classroom where different group used to give feedbacks about other groups. We gave our presentation pretty well but sadly our group was eliminated and I was good with that because I got to know where we did mistake and learned a lot from the judges feedbacks.
After the first group presentation we were sent to the new groups and the new group I joined had a different sector from what I had before. They had culture sector so I got a chance to learn about their users and the problems of their users. Meanwhile, we also had guest speaker sessions where we were taught about agile, lean startup and many more. After joining the new group we had to make our final presentation before final exams. We started our presentation, made business model canvas but afterwards we found out that we were confused about the solutions as we thought we were supposed to come up with solution for one user which was not true. We had only 3 days left until the date of final presentation. We started panicking and got nervous too. In the virtual meeting we all were silent and did not knew how to cover up the whole thing in just 3 days. But we did not gave up and started working so hard from the first. We had to change our whole BMC concept and prototype as well due to miscommunication. We continuously had meetings to prepare the final presentation which was really stressful. I was excited as well to see how our presentation might turn out.
We completed the presentation and presented it but we got a bit negative feedback which we were not expecting at all. It was a bit hard to accept those feedback for a moment but at the end our group took it positively as a constructive feedback which will definitely help us one day. In a nutshell, I really liked this subject as I got to learn not only about various topics but also learned how to give feedbacks and many more. We used to fill the feedback thermometer and weekly grading where we used to grade ourselves according to how much we learned in an entire week’s session. I am really glad and thankful to my teachers and guest speakers who taught us about various different topics in depth. I really enjoyed the classes.
