Design Thinking Workshop: Empathy, Ideation, and Prototyping

Justin inspires creativity through design thinking, emphasizing empathy and collaboration to unlock everyone's innovative potential.

### Design Thinking Workshop: Fostering Creativity and Collaboration
* 🎉 A heartfelt thank you was extended to the Irish Times and Johnny for organizing the event, as well as to Justin for joining and sharing his **insights on design thinking**.
* 💡 The next event will likely be a **hackathon** scheduled for late February or March, inviting participants to **share ideas, data sources, or software tools** to enhance the experience.
* 🏛 The building will gradually open up more for community engagement, addressing **frustrations about the pace of activities** at the Irish Times.
* ✈ Special thanks were given to the US Embassy for covering Justin's travel expenses, enabling his participation and the **valuable insights he would share**.
* 👨 ‍🏫 Justin Frell from Stanford's D School introduced the concept of **human-centered design** and emphasized the **importance of creativity in problem-solving** through interactive exercises.
* 🖊 Participants engaged in a drawing exercise to explore their creative confidence, revealing that many adults often feel **constrained by past experiences and societal judgments about creativity**.
* 🤝 The workshop highlighted the significance of **empathy in design**, encouraging participants to **understand the needs and emotions of their partners** through in-depth interviews.
* 🛠 The session concluded with hands-on prototyping, where participants created and tested their ideas, emphasizing the **iterative process of design** and the **importance of feedback in refining solutions**.

I would like just to thank, firstly, the Irish Times and specifically Johnny for helping us organize this event in the Irish, and we are very delighted to have Justin here. Thank you very much, Justin, for coming here and with us today. Um, so I guess I'll just, before passing on to Johnny, I just would like to announce two things. As the next event, we would like to organize a hackathon. It would be most probably late February or sometime in March. So, if any of you have ideas, specific ideas for the hackathon, or if any of you have data sources which you would like to share with us for the hackathon, or if any of you have developed interesting APIs or software tools which you would like to be used or to share with us for the hackathon, please, uh, let me know. It's great to have everyone here in the building. We're going to be opening the building up more and more over time. We're only really getting to groups of how to do this.

anyone who's paid any attention to what's going on in the Irish Times in the last few years would probably be increasingly frustrated that we're not doing more things faster. So, thank you for coming here so you can help make that happen. We've a mix. We've some of our own Newsroom people and creatures people here today, and maybe we made a mistake because we've scared away the other media people in the city. So, hosting in the AR may or may not be a good idea in the future. Um, let me just say a big thank you to the US Embassy because it was the US Embassy that covered Justin's flights and his travel. Uh, and we've been talking for quite a few months about you coming over, really, really keen to see what you have to say tonight. But you know, we wouldn't have been able to pay for it without the US Embassy, so a big thank you to them. And without further ado, H. Justin, please. Thank you so much. All right. All right. Thank

you so thanks for having me. So, my name is Justin Frell, and I am here from California. I teach at Stanford University at the D School, which is, that's what we call it, it's the Design Institute at Stanford. Has anybody ever heard of the D School at all? Oh, okay, some of you, okay, cool. So, the D School was founded by David Kelly, who is the founder of IDEO. Has anybody heard of IDEO? It's a design consultancy firm. Okay, cool. So, we teach human-centered design at the D School, and what I thought I'd do tonight, instead of me talking a lot, is actually give you a crash course in design thinking. That's what we call this human-centered design process. Are you guys up for that? You have some energy? Okay, good. So, everyone's going to need something to write with and something to write on, and preferably like multiple sheets of paper. If you don't have paper, we can pass some out. You're also going to need to sit at a table with an even number of people.

because this is a paired activity, so you'll be pairing with one other person. So, I'm much more hacker than Hack. I, I, before I joined the D School a couple of years ago. I used to work at the Washington Post. I was there for, uh, six years. I was a digital design director when I left. So, um, I was not a programmer, but I hired programmers into the Post newsroom, uh, and really brought in programmer journalists to work with the design team and graphic artists and writers and others, um, which was, is, was a huge thing. Um, the Post is doing a lot of really interesting, uh, digital storytelling now because there are programmers in the newsroom, and having programmers and journalists work together is hugely important. And, in fact, hacked hackers was founded by a friend of mine in California who started it in San Francisco. And to see it move around the world as a local movement is really cool. So, it's really awesome to be here. And, uh, maybe afterwards, if anybody's interested in, uh

The Washington Post or stuff that we did there then feel free to come up and talk to me about that. Um, the first question I have for you guys basically is, uh, how many of you think of yourselves as creative? Raise your hand. Okay, pretty good. Okay, I want to give you, I'm going to give you 45 seconds now to draw a portrait of your neighbor. Okay, 45 seconds, ready? [Music] Go. Now I want you to share the portrait that you drew with the person you drew. What? Yeah, how did that feel? How did that feel? Pressured? Pressured. Okay, good. Yeah, I didn't give you very much time. What else? How did... What's that? Bad. Bad. Why did it feel bad? Because I can't even remotely draw. 'Cause you can't draw, right? So you felt bad about... Okay, what else? How else did it feel? Felt fun? Helpful? Fun? Fun. Oh, cool. Yeah, creative. Okay, good. So the reason why I wanted to do that exercise is because, um, research shows that it usually... If you ask that question of do you feel creative or not in a room

full of adults. Only about half of the adults will raise their hands, and the reason why a lot of adults don't feel creative is because when you're 8, 9, or 10 years old, somebody told them they couldn't draw right or some other artistic thing that you opted out of when you were a kid because you didn't feel like you were any good at it. And we tend to equate creative ability with artistic ability, but that's not what we think of as creative ability at the school. So yes, artistic ability is important, but what we are really teaching is the ability to show unfinished work, right, and the ability to participate in something that you might not be good at, right. So that's what we think about when we talk about creative confidence, the ability to take on problems that don't have a clear answer, right. And that sort of framework and posture is really important to coming up with innovative ideas because innovative ideas, by their nature, are things that are not yet defined, right. So

your willingness to take on new things, whether you can draw or not, is much more important than your ability to draw. So, the experience of being at the school as a student is you might be a computer science Master's student, and you could be on a team with an MBA student, and somebody from the medical school, and somebody from the school of education. And within your different expertise, you're finding out you're sharing your expertise with people who are very different than you, and you're finding the innovative ideas in the space between your expertise. So, it's all about how you collaborate with people who are good at things that you're not good at, and how do you share what you're good at without trying to, you know, Bigfoot the process, without traditional hierarchical leadership. Okay, so very much about in the similar way of how you would bring journalists and programmers together. We're not focused on outcomes, we're not focused on the innovations, we're focused on unlocking the potential with each innovator, right? Because if we

can bring out that aspect in you. Then you can create things that are going to be great, right? And you don't have to be in the D school at Stanford in order to do that. So, we believe that everyone has creativity inside of them, and it's about bringing it out. So, this is what we call creative confidence and how confident you are with, you know, approaching problems as opportunities and leading teams toward unimagined outcomes and trying new things and failing to learn and things like that. That's a very important aspect of creation of new ideas. The other thing that we always do is we always work on real projects. So, this is our executive director. He's standing on a train platform, and he's giving these executives a lesson about empathy and how you interview people for empathy, right before they get on the train and interview strangers about their commuting experience. So, we do things like that a lot. We go out into the world, and we talk to real people in order to uncover what their needs

are um everything we do is Hands-On. It's all experiential learning, so we think that, you know, it's one thing to stand up in front of people and talk to them about stuff, but the best way that you're going to learn is by doing it. So, you guys are going to experience that in just a second. Um, Innovation is not an event, right? The, it's not the sort of per, you know, area of one genius sitting in a dark room coming up with the Eureka sort of moment. We think that Innovation is a process, and it's a human-centered one, and that if you work the process, then you'll be able to come up with the ideas. Um, this is the process that we're going to run through really quickly, and we're going to get started in just a second, and this will probably be the longest time in a row that you'll hear me talk, but I'll talk about the process as we go through it step by step. Okay, how are you guys feeling? Good? Are

you ready? Okay, all right, so you need some paper. One other thing about this process is it's not just about creativity; it's also about abductive reasoning and analytical thinking, right? And most of the people that we encounter are really sharp analytical thinkers because that's what you've been trained to do your whole lives. So, in school, it's all about finding, surveying the landscape, and zooming in to the one right answer. But we also believe that people are really good at creative thinking; it's just a task that hasn't been asked a lot. And so, it's about unlocking that potential. So, within this process, as you go through it, there are times when you will be focusing and really analyzing and coming up with what you think is the way to go, and there are times when you will be flaring, which is really generating ideas and zooming way out. The key about this is separating the two. So, a lot of people will try to do both at the same time, and that doesn't work very well. So, we very

purposefully separate. So, for example, like in brainstorming, if you've ever been in a brainstorming meeting where people are throwing out ideas and selecting them at the same time, right? Or one person says, I'm not so sure about this, and nine people say they like it, but that one person, that kills it, right? It's gone. So, in brainstorming, we separate that out, right? There's the first rule of brainstorming: to defer all judgment. So, there is no selection during that part because you're just doing creative thinking. So, you'll experience that in just a second. Okay, let's do some very quick sketching as we get warmed up here. Okay, so again, I'm not going to ask you to draw your neighbors this time, but take about 10 seconds or so, and I'm going to flash a word up on the screen, and I want you to draw a little sketch of it. Okay, okay, baby. Okay, good. All right, door, house. Okay, last one, you ready? Innovation. How many of you, when you drew a baby, you put like one little curly C?

hair coming out of the baby's head. Anybody do that? Okay, all right, cool. How many have ever seen a baby that has one little curly cucumber? Oh, my sister. Oh, okay, all right, there you go. Okay, but that's not the point. The point is that we have this visual shorthand, right, that people understand, and it's easy to sketch very simply, you know, things that are common, and are, you know, if you draw a baby, you might draw one single hair coming on the head, whether that exists or not. How many of you like Drew like a light bulb or some kind of light for Innovation? Anybody? Okay, good, all right. So, this little drawing exercise, no matter whether you think you can draw or not, this is the highest level of fidelity that you need to be able to sketch out your ideas, right? Because it's not about how great the drawing is; it's about how you communicate it to someone else. So, when we're doing this activity and I ask you to sketch an idea instead of writing it out in a paragraph form.

this is as good as you need to be. Okay, so all of you are good enough at drawing to be able to draw to communicate your ideas. All right, all right, let's get started. So for this, you're going to need some paper, and um, what we're going to do is decide who in your group is partner A and who is partner B. So everybody needs to have a partner. Go ahead and decide who's A and who's B. The first thing I want you to do is by yourself. I want you to design a better wallet, the ideal wallet. Okay, so take a minute to design the ideal wallet. Actually, take 4 minutes, and I'll let you know when that time is up. You're going to do this by yourself, though. Okay, okay, everybody stop. How many of you in the course of your work, somebody gives you a problem, and you're like, Okay, I have to fix that. I'm going to go right to the solution. Does that happen? Design a better wallet. You got to go about it and do it right. You got to do it right away. Okay, so

that's a little bit of a false start that we just did, right? This is the way that we often work. Somebody gives you a problem; you have to come up with a solution. You don't have time to talk to anybody else, so you just dive right in and you do it, right? So now you're going to experience a longer process of what it's going to be like to design for someone else. So the first step in this process is empathy. What do I mean by empathy? What does empathy mean? Is that put yourself in somebody else's shoes? Yeah, exactly. Put yourself in somebody else's shoes. Perfect. Yeah, empathy. So it looks like this. It's when you can feel what another person is feeling, when you can mirror their expression, their opinions, and their hopes, right? Putting yourself in their shoes. Okay, so some of the aspects to practice empathy are um without judgment, right? By being a beginner, by being curious about somebody else, by uh being optimistic and always by being respectful if somebody else is sharing uh their practice or what they do, right?

you you're not there to judge them. You're just there to learn and hear what they have to say. Okay, so what we're going to do now is now I want you to design something useful and meaningful for your partner first by gaining empathy with them. So we're going to start thinking about how designing a wallet for your partner. So in just a second, I want partner A to interview partner B right about their wallet. So to do this, you'll probably need to bring out your wallet and walk the other person through what you carry in your wallet, why you carry it. Okay, and for the person doing the interviewing, this is not like journalism interviewing, right? You're not interviewing toward a particular point. You're not writing a story about it. I want you to try to elicit as many stories as you can, okay, based off of what they carry in their wallet. Does that make sense? Okay, partner A, interview partner B. Make sure you take notes. I'll let you know when it's time to switch roles.

okay, okay, you guys hearing some pretty good stories. Are you learning something about each other? No, no good stories. Yeah, okay, good. All right, I'm going to give you a chance to do a second round now because usually what happens in a first interview like that is you get a lot of information, right? You get like what they carry in their wallet and you know where maybe where they got their wallet and you know some other bits like that, right? And so that's all sort of the explicit reasons why they have their wallet, right? Now I want you to get at some of the emotions underneath it. I want you to find out the implicit reasons of why they carry what in their wallet. And the best way to do this is to be like a child and to ask why, right? So if somebody says, Oh, I only carry cash in my wallet. Why? Why do you only carry cash? Well, I don't really trust credit cards. Why don't you trust credit cards? Well, because when I was a kid, my parents said that credit cards were evil and blah.

blah blah why did your parents say that you know what I mean and the thing is if you ask why five times usually someone will end up in tears you know cuz it'll be like because my parents didn't love me the way wanted or whatever right I don't necessarily want to see that happen um but I do want you to get to some of the reasons underneath okay so I'm going to give you a little bit of time to dig deeper I'm going to give you three minutes this time so I'd like switch back again you have three minutes and ask why and try to get to some of the emotions underneath what they carry okay three minutes so you heard some interesting stories good you ready for the next step all right the next step is called Define so so you know how I showed you that focus and flare part right so what you were just doing is you're gathering information so you're coming out like this right and in defined stage you're going to be focusing so what do you do

with that information, so um, to talk about that a little bit, take a look at this picture. Okay, can you see, you guys see that? Okay, all right. What does this little girl need? Information, information. What else? What was it? What did you say? Metal? Adult? An adult? Yeah, maybe she needs adult supervision. Okay, what else? Lower shelves, lower shelves. All right, socks, a ladder. Okay, good. All right, what else? Information? Yeah, figure time to figure it out for herself. Okay, so now I want you to think about a little different way, and I just realized that this is cut off, but in my picture, I can see this is definitely an Irish girl 'cause there's a bottle of J Jon's right up here. Okay, um, I want you to think about um, needs as verbs instead of nouns. Okay, so nouns are more solutions. What does she need? She needs a latter, she needs a book, she needs an adult, right? But needs, if you think of needs as being verbs, that can be a lot more generative, right? So instead of a latter, if you think of

She needs to reach right then. The solution for that could be a ladder, it could be a pogo stick, it could be a bionic arm, right? So needs, if you focus in just on the need and hold off on the solution, right? Then the needs will generate ideas for solutions that you wouldn't come to otherwise. Does that make sense? So if you guys ever heard, you know, the Henry Ford quote, he said, If I ask people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse, right? And then Steve Jobs used to use that to talk about why he doesn't do focus group testing, okay? This isn't about focus group testing, but it is about finding out what the needs are. So if Henry Ford had asked people what they wanted and they said to go faster, then the automobile is one such solution to go faster, right? It could have been a rocket ship, it could have been something else. So what you're trying to do now is you're trying to identify the needs that your user has based off the interviews that you just did. So needs are human.

physical and emotional necessities. They capture the goals and the motivations for whom you're designing. Right, a need to carry no wallet at all, right? That's one of the needs, okay? Um, they're verbs, not nouns, so they're opportunities, not solutions. The other thing I want you to think about, and this is a little trickier given that you've only just met this person, but I want you to think about insights. So, if needs are a verb, then the insight, sorry, is the why response to the need. So, maybe if you spent time with that little girl at her house, you would realize that, you know, her parents are having a dinner party, and it has nothing to do with a book at all. She's perched precariously on that bookshelf because she needs their attention, right? Because they're not paying any attention to her or something like that. That would be an insight that you might be able to uncover if you did, got really deep into your empathy work, if you were doing observation and immersion like in the

moment. So, what I want you to do is think about, um, what are some of the insights based off the needs that you might have uncovered from these interviews. All right, and this is a solo part of the exercise, so you're doing this on your own, based off the interviews that you just did. I want you to jot down in this model right here. So, describe your partner a little bit. What are the things that they're trying to do right, which we can categorize as needs, and try to use verbs if you can, and ways they want to feel, and those are your insights. So, what are they trying to do, and ways that they want to feel, based off the stories that you heard in the interviews that you made. Okay, so you have three minutes to jot down some of those in each category. Okay, okay. So, a lot of people, when they design a new product or a service, you think about a certain segment of the market, right, and you try to design for the middle in some way so you can reach a lot of people, right, at

the D school. We actually teach a focus on individuals and to not design for the middle. The reason why is because a lot of times if you try to design for the most people possible, you try to design for the middle, you end up making a lot of concessions along the way, and you design something that has a lot of features in it because you want it to appeal to a lot of people, and it ends up appealing actually to no one. Okay, so we tell people to focus on individuals when you're designing. Who knows what this is? What's that? Yeah, it's a peeler, right? This is actually an Oxo good grips potato peeler or carrot peeler or whatever. Does anybody know the story of how Oxo came up with this innovation in kitchen utensils? Okay, so the CEO of Oxo, his wife had really bad arthritis, and you guys remember when peelers were all metal, right? I still have one of these, the metal ones, and they're really small.

and they look like they were from the 1920s or something. Do you remember those? And his wife couldn't hold on to it because it was too small, right? And it was too hard to hold because she had arthritis. And so he had the company come up with this one with this big cushy handle, right? And it turns out that whether you have arthritis or not, everybody would prefer a big cushy handle. And Oxo good grips are all over the place now with all kinds of their on all kinds of kitchen utensils, right? All the utensils have this kind of grip. So by focusing on an extreme user, somebody who had an extreme need in the space, her needs and the insights around those needs were really amplified because she had arthritis. And so ideally, when you're working on a new product or service, you should figure out who are the extreme users in your space. You know, people who are hardcore users of your product already or you know, people who are using that type of

thing all the time, or people who never do. Sometimes, people forget that extreme users can also be people who never use your product, right? And if you uncover those needs, sometimes they can be amplified. Okay, so what you're going to do now is you're going to focus on the individual that you've been talking to. You've come up with some needs and some insights, and I want you to craft what we call a point of view statement. This is your point of view about your user. This becomes sort of the driving force of the thing that you're going to design later on, okay? So, the components of a point of view: there's a description of your user, there's a need that you've uncovered, and there's an insight that goes with that need, okay? So, here's an example of a point of view from a class we taught at the D school that was around health and student lunches, right? And here's their first crack of it. Teenager needs to eat healthy food because certain nutrients are necessary for physical and

cognitive health and development. What do you guys think of that point of view? Teenagers need to eat healthy food because healthy food is important. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Doesn't sound like it comes from the teenager. Yeah, it doesn't sound like it comes from the teenager. That's right. You know some teenagers, huh? Yeah, that doesn't come from the teenager. That's like a projected need, does it? Sound like you could have come up with that need, whether you talk to somebody or not. Sounds like, sounds like not personal. Yeah, it's not personal. What else? No emotion. There's no emotion there. Yeah, there's no real tension. What else? What about teenager? Are they all the same? I don't think they cons. They're not concerned with healthy foods. Yeah, yeah. So, what are they concerned with, right? You really need to get it out of them. But what about the, what about describing the user as just a teenager? Spe, you know, it's too broad, right? It's too general. Yes, exactly right. And um, okay, and we sort of covered this so

here are the components of a very strong point of view statement. Okay, so they went back and they took another crack at it. Sorry, jet lag. And the user said, so the user they came up with was not a teenager, just a teenager, but a ninth-grade girl at a new school. Okay, there's a little something there. You're 14 years old, you're a girl, and you're at a new school. It's a little bit of a tough environment, right? She needs to feel socially accepted while eating healthy food. So like you said, so that's a deep need, that's her need, not a projected need. That's something that came from interviewing this girl and seeing her in her school environment. And why does she need that? Because in her crew, a social risk is more dangerous than a health risk. So this is a surprising finding that's rooted in your empathy work. So now let's see what that problem, that point of view statement looks like. Ninth-grade girl at a new school needs

to feel socially accepted while eating healthy food because in her crew, a social risk is more dangerous than a health risk. Does that sound like something you could start to think of ways to help her? Things that you could design for. It has a lot more tension and intrigue in it than teenager needs to eat healthy food in order to be healthy, right? So, this is what you're shooting for in your point of view. You want to have a specific user, you want to have a deep need, and you want to have some surprise and finding. So, what I'd like you to do now is look at your list of needs and insights that you came up with, describe your user, and create this sort of Mad Lib fill-in-the-blank sentence. Who is your user, what do they need, and what's the best insight? What's the most interesting one that you came up with? So, you're only choosing one here, and you can't mix and match. You can't just choose a cool need and a cool insight if they don't have anything to do with each other.

other they have to be at ated okay, and I want you to write a problem statement. Sorry, we call it a problem statement or point of view statement, a point of view statement about your user. The next step we're going to do is id8. That's just a Silicon Valley jargon way to say brainstorming. Basically, there's more than one way to ideate, but primarily, we're going to brainstorm. Brainstorming is a high-energy activity. You've got to have the blood flowing, okay? And you're about to do some brainstorming. And I've never liked this about this particular activity because we never brainstorm alone, but you're going to be brainstorming alone, which is weird, okay? But you've got to have a lot of energy. So, you remember we talked about focusing and flaring, so this is the brainstorming part right here. It's like the height of your flare, okay? Um, this is a two-time Nobel Prize-winning chemist, Linus Pauling, the only individual to win the Nobel Prize twice. He said the

best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas, right? The more ideas you get, the more possibility you're going to come up with something good. Okay, so these are the rules that we teach around Brain Me. I told you before the first rule. I can't believe I'm so out of breath. I need to exercise. The first rule is to defer judgment, okay? And this is particularly hard for yourself because you're the only one doing it. So don't sit there and think, Oh, I got to come up with a great idea. You know, some people will be like, Ah, the first idea has got to be good. You know, and they just can't get started. When we start this, I want you to just write the first idea that pops in your head. Try to open the spigot, right? And then things will start to come out. So don't judge your ideas. The second one is go for as many ideas as you can. I want you to be visual if you can. Remember, you guys can all draw babies and doors and houses, so you

can draw the ideas that pop into your head too, and I want you to get as wild ideas as you can, okay? You don't even have to think about whether they're feasible or you know how much it would cost to come up with this thing. So, your brainstorming, just to be clear, your brainstorming ideas around your problem statement, okay? So, in the problem statement of the girl with the food, right, it's, you know, she's social risk is more dangerous than a health risk. So, how might you help her make, you know, eating healthy food cool, right? How might we serve healthy food that has a cool bent? How might we redesign the cafeteria so that the healthy choices are more evident, right? I want you to come up with as interesting ideas as you can to meet the needs in this problem statement, okay? And I'm going to give you just a couple of minutes to do it. You should just write down or sketch whatever pops into your head and come up with, you know, as many ideas as possible.

and really encourage wild ideas. Okay, now comes the fun part. You get to share your ideas with each other, right? And the beauty of this is that you're not looking to try and say, Hey, I came up with the perfect idea for you. Don't you love this idea? I got you down, man. I listened to what you said, and I came up with a perfect. That's not what you're trying to do here. What you're trying to do is get feedback. You're trying to get them to tell you what they think of the idea and how might they do it differently. And you know, do you have it? You know, do they think it's right or not right? So, this is gold for you, right? This is the thing that's going to push you closer to coming up with a design solution that's useful to your user. Okay, so I want partner A to share their ideas with partner B. You can share your point of view statement too. Remember to go easy on each other. Don't argue about the point of view statement. Did you get some

good feedback. How about, did you hear some good ideas? Okay, all right, cool. So, the next thing I want you to do is just take a minute to think about, choose the idea that seemed to have the most traction or that's your favorite, okay? And think about it as if it were a product or a service. If this were a company, you were going to manufacture these things, whatever they are, these headbands that project holograms or whatever it is, right? What would that product look like? Or if it's a service, what does the service look like? Is it an app that helps connect people with different things or what is it? So, take just a minute to think about your favorite ideas, adding the thoughts that you got back from your user. What would it look like as a product or a service? Okay, so one of the things we talk about at the d.school is we, one of the sort of mindsets we teach is this bias toward action. So, instead of sitting around and talking about something or

maybe arguing with colleagues in another team about the right direction to go. Make a rough prototype, test it in the field, and then you have some feedback from a real customer, right? So stop talking about it, get it out of your head and into the real world. So that's what you guys are going to do in just a second. I've pulled out Johnny, and I have grabbed all these prototyping materials. There's some really nice stuff up here. We got some rubber bands, we got some tape, we got some cups, and we got some paper. And in just a second, I want you to create a prototype of your idea, okay? A facsimile, a representation of your idea, okay? But very quickly, two things about prototyping. So one thing, if you spend any time out in the valley or other places too, when they talk about rapid prototyping, you want to fail early, right? In order to learn when it doesn't cost you very much. So in the case, my case at the Washington Post, we would design the iPad app for the Washington

Post say and we wouldn't know until it went into the Apple Store whether people really liked it or not. Well, at that point, to make changes, we got to go back and recode things in Objective C, and it's really expensive, right? But if you start out designing an iPad app by drawing the experience on pieces of paper, and I take it to you, and I say, When you press this button here, and here's the next screen, press this button, here's the next screen, right? Then the changes aren't going to cost me very much 'cause I just drew them on a piece of paper. Not only that, but like how many of you have ever made something, and you spent a lot of time on it, and then you went to ask somebody if they liked it or not, and you didn't really want to tell, you didn't want them to give you honest feedback, you just wanted them to say, I love it, right? So, the other thing with rough prototyping is it makes it really easy to get feedback because I didn't put a

lot of time into this. I'm just testing an initial idea. Well, this little chart here shows sort of, you know, this is the project timeline against launch and against cost, right? So, if you test it over here, you're learning early on when it doesn't cost you very much. If you wait up here, it's going to cost you a lot. The other thing about prototyping is then you want to test often. So, you start out with paper and you test that and you get some feedback, and then you go back and you make a little bit higher resolution prototype. Maybe you get an artist to draw it or something. Then you test that again, then you go back, and then maybe you start coding something, you test it again, and each time your resolution gets higher and higher, and you do so much testing, right, that by the time you actually launch it into the real world, you've mitigated your risk because you've done all this testing, you've learned as you went along, you've gotten a higher and higher rest, okay? You're only going to do one prototype.

here today, but those are the two main things that I want to leave you with about prototyping: fail early and test often. Okay, so now you have eight minutes, eight minutes to make a real prototype using these types of materials, or you can use whatever you have that you can then test with your user after eight minutes. Okay, 8 minutes design your product or service. Okay, this is the testing phase. The main thing about testing, I don't know what I did with my remote. Oh, thanks. This is the thing to remember about testing: you don't want to be like this guy, okay? You're not a used car salesman. You're not trying to say, Have I got a thing for you. This is exactly what you need, right? Testing is just another chance for you to get more feedback so you could create a higher-res prototype that suits your user needs a little better. Okay, so go ahead and share. We're not going to do multiple cycles; this is the last step. But go ahead and share your prototype with your neighbor and explain to them why you made it for them.

okay, has everyone gotten a chance to share their prototype? Who would share something that somebody made for you? Any volunteers right here? Okay, cool, awesome. So yeah, my big problem is that I really don't like having to carry a wallet at all. I kind of hate it. So um, the design that was made for me, the Prototype that's been made for me, is more a cover for my phone, which also functions as a wallet. So that sounds like something that you might use? Yeah, actually, it's a nice idea. All right, cool, all right. And what was the story that he told you that sort of got you to that kind of design? Um, pretty much he just doesn't like wallets. He does carry a wallet in his pocket, he carries it in his bag. He doesn't want one, you know what I mean? You know, in an IDE world, could be no wallet, there be your phone, you pay with your phone, you do whatever, like, but so I guess it's pretty much the idea that he doesn't want a w you, he actually doesn't want this.

product you, but basically, I just wanted to expose you to these methods and also, you know, help you realize that as you're all a new community and you're just meeting each other, like, it's very easy to get to know each other and to just engage and try to create something together. All of you tonight made something for someone else, which I think is really cool, and all of you received something that someone you didn't know probably made for you, right? So, certainly, you can figure out how to work together and combine your skills to come up with things that you do really care about, not new wallets, right? So, um, thank you very much for participating and going to back over to you guys.

Design Thinking workshop with Justin Ferrell of Stanford d. School at The Irish Times

Johnny Ryan

Organizing a Hackathon and Design Thinking Crash Course

The event organizer thanked the Irish Times and the US Embassy for their support and announced a hackathon planned for late February or March, inviting ideas and data sources from attendees.

Justin Frell from Stanford's D School, known for its human-centered design approach, offered a crash course in design thinking, emphasizing the importance of collaboration between programmers and journalists.

The session included a creative exercise where participants drew portraits of their neighbors to explore their own creativity.

Many adults feel they lack creativity due to past negative experiences with artistic abilities.

The focus on creative confidence is about embracing unfinished work, collaborating with diverse individuals, and approaching problems as opportunities.

The process of innovation is human-centered and involves experiential learning, with a balance between analytical thinking and creative idea generation.

The brainstorming process is most effective when judgment is deferred, allowing for creative thinking without selection.

Simple sketching can effectively communicate ideas, emphasizing that drawing doesn't have to be perfect.

Empathy is crucial in design, and the process involves understanding and mirroring another person's feelings and experiences, which can be practiced through non-judgmental curiosity and respectful listening.

Uncovering Implicit Needs Through Empathy

The exercise involves a second round of questioning to dig deeper into the emotional reasons behind what people carry in their wallets.

By asking "why" multiple times, participants can uncover underlying motivations and emotions.

The focus then shifts to defining needs as verbs, which can generate a broader range of solutions and insights for design opportunities.

Designing for Individual Needs: Insights and Point of View

The exercise focuses on uncovering individual needs and insights from user interviews, emphasizing the importance of not designing for the middle of the market.

The Oxo good grips potato peeler is highlighted as a successful example of addressing the needs of an extreme user with arthritis, leading to a design that appeals to a wider audience.

The point of view statement is introduced as a way to capture the user's description, their need, and the associated insight, stressing the importance of personalization and emotional connection in the design process.

Crafting a Strong Point of View Statement

A ninth-grade girl at a new school needs to feel socially accepted while eating healthy food, as a social risk is more dangerous than a health risk in her crew.

This insight, rooted in empathy work, highlights her deep need for acceptance in a tough environment.

The point of view statement aims to create tension and intrigue, guiding the design of potential solutions to help her.

The Importance of Feedback and Prototyping in Idea Development

Sharing ideas with others is crucial for getting feedback and refining them.

It's important to think about the chosen idea as a product or service and visualize its implementation.

Rapid prototyping is key to learning and making changes early, allowing for valuable feedback without significant costs.

The Importance of Prototyping and Testing

Prototyping involves testing early and often to mitigate risk and improve the final product.

The process starts with low-resolution prototypes and gradually increases in complexity based on user feedback.

The goal is to create a product that meets user needs while fostering collaboration and community engagement.