GDC, Week 15: Design Thinking with Miss Yong Yee

In this week's session, Miss Yong Yee was invited to give us a talk about design thinking. She's an entrepreneur, activist, and currently a P.hD student. She started the talk by giving us some examples of design that did not make the cut due to the lack of design thinking, and she also stated that even if there are times we have already use the steps of design thinking, through the process, we would somehow shift our objective from the start to something else.

Design Thinking helps the people

When products are created, they are catered to humans, the user experience is very important. Not only that, we must consider things that were an influence to them such as their backgrounds and surroundings. With the help of design thinking, designers would get a more insight view on how their stakeholders deal with their problems, and how they solve them or live with them.

The steps of Design Thinking

Step 1: Empathize

Designers are human, but not all designers are the same, they don't live life the same, they don't experience the same thing. With that being said, designers begin to start being researchers. To do research relating to solving the well-being of the stakeholders. From the basic, we could start of with some secondary research, going through books and articles. But to get clearer data, we could do a survey, where it's easier to generate the data and fast enough to share. Even so, the accuracy will not be fully targeted to the audience you actually seek just cause the survey could be done by anyone. And so, the best way to empathize is to engage, observe and immerse. Getting down and dirty is not easy, but that's the only way to fully understand and utilize this technique. We have to meet people with the problem, actually asking them their experience or even times where we could observe them from a distance just to understand from a point of view. But the best way to empathize is to truly immerse into the stakeholder's surroundings, be one of them, and truly understand them.

Step 2: Define

After understanding the true issue of the situation, the next step is to find a perspective, the context of the problem. After doing the research, there's a high chance that there are other problems that could occur. But to take things one at a time, we should start filtering them and arrange them into a more specific objective.

Step 3: Ideate

Brainstorming. Looking at the main objective of the issue, the start of solving it is undeniably a way of human nature. When we come to this part of the step, we were told to think of any ideas possible to solve the problem, but it can't be help if we worried if it might get accepted or not. So, at this stage, we have to start to stop limiting ourselves when it comes to an idea, even if it wasn't real, we still could give it a shot, or even using it as a potential idea for the next projects.

Step 4: Prototype

Mapping the idea down is the beginning of initiating it. Following the idea, a prototype needs to be produced in order to see if it works. The prototype is also a way to show the people the idea in realistic

Step 5: Test

After creating the prototype, we need to seek feedback from the stakeholders and get their opinions on the idea, whether it helped the user or there's still some space to improve on the idea.