What if our imaginations were set free to do just anything and everything?
Well, that almost sums up the process of design thinking that we have utilised in our project the Data Visualisation course.
Let me breakdown what is design thinking and its major phases on behalf of my team, consisting of Piet, Ladan and Natalia.
You can see design thinking as an approach towards innovation, that is strategic, practical as well as very cognitive.
It is a process of problem-solving, by using creativity at max. It of course has human at its core and is used to develop not only just products but designing services and organisations too. When design thinking is applied, it is tried to bring together what's desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable.
The three main stages that we have utilised in this creative process are :
Diverge, Emerge and Converge.
Diverge phase is about coming up with many, distinct ideas or solutions to a problem. In this phase, we generate several different answers or paths forward by random, free-flowing thought. In this case, we were ideating different types of visualisation that can be interesting for our project.
In diverge phase, we all literally thought out of the box! We were curious and willing to tap into our creativity as much as possible and surely had fun in the process!
Emerge phase comes after the very independent diverge phase, where we look at the various designs that came up in the diverge phase and try to group them. It was indeed the most satisfying time of the process that not only made us understand team members better but also visualise the objective we are chasing as a team.
But it is a worthy remark that the journey is as beautiful (creative!) and important as the destination!
The next phase is the Converge Phase. This is the phase where it is decided upon which creative solutions to accept. Reaching the objective within the framework of known facts and narrowing down the solution based on logical inference is what this method of reasoning means.
Let me now add some anecdotes of how as a team we approached this set of assignment:
Firstly, each one of us uploaded some designs to the miro board. Well honestly, they were safe mostly. Even though we had a handful of very innovative sketches, but we were definitely not putting out our best feet.
Then we had the feedback session, which was clearly enlightening. We then decided only to think out of the box, but declare, that there actually is no box.
And after that, all of us met and individually put all the creativity that we could, and built some very colourful, funny, and essentially innovative sketches.
Finally, we had a good number of sketches that we were proud of as a team!
Our Sketches and designs can be accessed via this link to the Miro board of the team!