Design Thinking for Life

13 Sep, 2018
Blog

I’ve slowly been working through the IDF courses and I keep running into the thought and common thread of Design Thinking for Life. This isn’t a novel concept, but I am definitely connecting the dots in my own life, that all of these ideas that we’re mentioning for furthering design projects should be used in most aspects of life and work. Take this suggestion for setting up a user interview:

  • Begin with the purpose of the interview – what are you trying to achieve?

  • Explain how the person’s data and any data you collect will be used from the interview.

  • Keep leading questions to a minimum. A good question is “Do you use instant messaging?” rather than “How often do you use Snapchat?” The former lets you explore what the user actually does. The latter presupposes that user is working with Snapchat and that’s the extent of their instant messaging activity.

  • Keep it [reasonably short]. If it takes more than 10 minutes to read… it’s probably too long. Interviews should, ideally, be less than 1 hour long and the majority of the time spent should be the interviewee talking and the researcher listening.

As a reminder, this is just talking about interviewing Users for their thoughts on a technology or design or life process. However, how much better would meetings and projects in general go if these general ideals were upheld? Give teams purpose and vision, let your involvement be minimal. Trust people to do what they do best and serve as someone who will just prime the pump for that action.

This chapter also addressed Aristotle’s seven elements of storytelling:

  1. Plot
  2. Character
  3. Theme
  4. Dialogue
  5. Melody/Chorus
  6. Décor
  7. Spectacle

And frankly, I know I’ve done a poor job of laying the groundwork for teams when it comes to connecting them to the story of a project. Excited to keep this in mind and develop my story telling skills a little bit better. Looking forward to finding ways to incorporate design thinking throughout life, not just in projects, but making sure I’m cultivating relationships and stories in my everyday life that everyone looks back on fondly.