Today, was Day One of my Service Design Innovation masters degree learning experience. In the session, Paul Sternberg director of the Masters of Design and Innovation, asked a simple question – well, it seemed simple when I heard it but not when I started to think about it – “What is Design?” Fellow students’ answers included: Improving things; making change; asking questions, just to name a few. I said, “A way of doing things”. After all, everyone is in fact a designer when they do anything their way. It’s just some are better than others. A few hours later, I found my answer too simplistic. I got obsessed with trying to find out more definitions and to think about those definitions hoping to find one that resonates with me. In the coming posts, I’l be sharing some of those definitions and my observations and reflections.
After the “What is Design?” question, Paul asked the second one: “What is design thinking?” With all my interest in the world of Design and designing experiences, I have to admit that I never asked myself about design thinking. As the day progressed the picture started to get clearer. To me, it felt that design thinking is similar to how our brains put words together to communicate. In fractions of a second, we think about we want to say, how to say it, why to say it in that way and not another, and to whom are we saying to. The speed and frequency of this process occur thousands of times on daily basis that we just don’t consciously think about it. It is important though in Design, as with communication, to ask “what if we say/do this instead of that?”; to challenge our minds when we’re thinking; and to examine the synthesis itself of how we bring disconnected things together. This course makes me dig deeper. I like it.
Takeaway thought? Think about the thinking.
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