Lego and Playdo in a fourth year commerce, WHAT IS GOING ON?!?!?!?
Last week the studio started with a flashback to the good old days of when responsibility consisted of nagging your mother when you were hungry (and obviously asking nicely for a grilled cheese sandwich). Being early to the studio I was able to start building early, and build I did. I was able to recruit a team to aid me on my endeavour to build the highest Lego tower the D. Studio has ever seen!!!!! Well, to be fair, the only Lego tower the class has ever seen.
Our team set out to plan activities for the studio’s open house. We started with Moura’s ask, try, do framework. If there’s one thing I can take from this weeks articles, it’s that no matter what you are trying to design, it’s never a one step process. Our group started with many ideas, some were thrown out right away while others were kept. As mentioned by Charles Owen in Beckman’s article, our design process became a problem solving process. We were trying to not only plan a successful event, but also to function well together as a brainstorming team. This often tends to not be the easiest thing, as Sauder tends to be full of type A personalities.
Our group succeeded! We were able to avoid friction by including aspects of all our ideas in the room we planned out. The plan consisted of a personal reflection segment at the front of the classroom, a ginger bread man design booth in the middle, and a Lego bridge teamwork event at the back.
Beckman and Berry’s framework that touches on the realm of theory and the realm of practice seemed appropriate when the class was presenting. Teams were presenting their ideas in the realm of theory and being evaluated by their peers on the functionality of the design in the perceived realm of practice. I remember thinking a few ideas would be impossible to implement, bringing me to my last point…
I feel design is both a wonderful thing and a curse. If you spend too much time on one idea you can become far too invested. This is a problem many entrepreneurs face and a reason why many businesses fail, the designer isolates the one idea and can end up refining something that’s completely unrealistic.
I feel this happened to my group at some points. We went through the “Brainstorm, Prototype, Presentation and Feedback” process and prepared our presentation whiteboard. Before presentation however, after a lot of effort in brainstorming and prototyping, we found that nearly half of our completed and prototyped ideas were thrown out.
I think the most important part of design is a team that is not afraid to criticize an idea at every step of the process, even upon completion. Because our team was able to effectively communicate criticism of some ideas and axe them before our presentation, the most realistic and functional product was delivered in the end.
Design without critique from experienced individuals in the field you’re doing work in can go in the wrong direction. I’m not saying you should listen to the criticism. What I am saying is it’s better to hear it early rather than late. In the end, you will have to answer to every criticism for your idea to take off.
You bring up a really great point about how “design can be a wonderful thing and a curse.” There are so many instances of when entrepreneurs have faced tunnel vision on their ideas and can’t wrap their heads around why it wouldn’t succeed in the marketplace. A divergent thinking strategy can really help these individuals realize their mistake before they invest so much time and possibly funds in a project that will likely fail. A simple solution to such an entrepreneur is to initially bounce off their idea among friends to see what kind of reaction he gets. Even better would be to form a design team to co-create his vision, the initial idea may even develop into something even more exciting than what the entrepreneur initially conceived!