Through this last project we have had a great opportunity to go through the design process while creating ideas for ways to portray the Design Studio during the Sauder Open House. I think we really made use of the “Ask. Try. Do.” method to help generate ideas and create an open house that would work with our time and space constraints, but also show off design thinking to the public.
During the “Ask” phase, we defined what our goals were for the event and what kind of activities and decorations would help us achieve these goals. We developed insights on how to best showcase design and the workings of the studio and really work within the constraints that we’d been given. It was also important at this stage to focus on the type of people that would be attending the event, how much time they had to spend with us, and how to hold their attention for longer periods of time. We mainly used brainstorming during this period and looked to come up with as many creative ideas as we could.
We were constantly finding that ideas that we loved (like a long winding path through the studio) just wouldn’t be feasible with the space by drawing it out and testing the ideas. By drawing our plans on a sort of makeshift floor plan, we were able to find out what would work with our space and what was a little too ambitious.
The reflection that came after this was very useful in combining our ideas and identifying the best way to use our space. Everyone had unique and interesting ideas and immediately I started thinking about how we could improve our idea.
Implementation is coming soon and it will be interesting to monitor and learn from the experience. I’m sure there are things we missed or that will need to be changed last minute but it will be interesting to see everything come together.
I agree with a lot of the points made in Donald Schon’s “The Structure of Reflection in action.” We all used experience with past events and were constantly questioning each other on the ideas we came up with. We also made a lot of changes to our plan when we changed from sticky note ideas to the floor plan. It was easy for us to say how something would work, but drawing it out introduced new complications. This new perspective really helped us to experiment until we found an idea that worked with our constraints while accomplishing our goals.
Sara Beckman offers some very interesting frameworks in her article “Innovation as a learning process: Embedding design thinking.” I felt like the innovation process, as story telling was similar to the way we approached our project. We created a sort of adventure for people coming to visit the design studio and tied it together with the circus theme. By doing so, we were able to create something we cared about and filled in any of the missing pieces as we went.
The Ask.Try.Do model seems to come more and more naturally to us; it feels like we automatically begin this process without consciously deciding to use it. After skimming through some blogs, seems like my group and yours went through a similar process. Ideas came flowing first but as we evaluated the constraints of the room, time, and resources, we also had to modify our original ideas to be realistically feasible. I also agree that the group discussion that followed was very useful because our collaboration of ideas really generated the best plan possible for the Sauder building launch. Taking the best ideas from each group and incorporating it into a single plan would have been better than just picking one group’s idea out of everyone. Overall, similar experience to yours Ryan!