In our day to day lives of software development, how frequent do we really think? Isn’t everything turning into muscle memory? At least for me, things were pretty much like muscle memory. I would acknowledge two events which made me realize the need to questioning my thinking. First, it came in the form of the book titled Sprint by Jake Knapp which touched on the topic of the design sprint. The second one was in the form of a hands-on workshop on Design Thinking by Zishan Jiwani. Cheers to the team at KarmaCircles for organizing the event and kudos to Zishan.
After months of reading about design thinking, I delivered my first session to 14 kids(age: 10 to 15 years old) at their survival camp in Dehradun. Need to thank my friend Ravi Dabbiroo for inviting me. The kids came from The Integral School, Hyderabad. They were divided into three teams and assigned a task to design an alarm clock for a blind person. I hope the results would astonish you:
What is design thinking?
A design methodology that provides a solution-based approach to solving problems.
Design thinking really provides us a proper framework for structuring our ideas and bring them to life. It starts with the most important concept of empathy. We can only solve a problem when we empathize with those suffering from the problem.
So are you really interested to kickstart your journey into design thinking? Following are a few resources to get started:
- Creative Confidence by Tom and David Kelley – A brilliant book to start
- d.school at Stanford – Lots of resources to get started
- The Node Chair – A classic case study of design thinking
I hope the above resources shall give you enough to initiate your journey. The best part being it works for everyone irrespective of one’s background and nature of job.