I still struggle with the concept of this, but the best way to understand how to do something is to practice it.  This activity, the Design Sprint, was just that.  It was a ‘real-world’, crash course, run through of design thinking.  By working through this process, I better understand the individual steps of design thinking and how they build upon each other.

What I think made this assignment the most enjoyable was working with a partner.  We took turns interviewing each other to discover a problem that the other might be facing.  Throughout this process, I was able to get to know a peer more and understand someone else’s perspective of their experience at school.

Another benefit I found of having a partner while completing this was if either of us were unclear about a certain step or element, we were able to ask the other what they thought.  Since neither of us had never worked with design thinking before, it was a new process for me and my partner.

Overview of The Design Sprint

Overall, the worksheet provided to guide us through the design thinking process was very easy to follow.  It was complex in that it covered all of the steps of design thinking but wasn’t difficult to follow.  Instead, it broke each of the main steps down into smaller steps in order to explain certain concepts and ensure that each step was completed to its entirety.  It provided room for error or uncertainty and to learn from any problems that arose.

The worksheet was a total of twelve sub steps broken down amongst the five main steps of design thinking.  Most of them were completed individually, using information we had previously gathered from our partner.  It didn’t take an exceedingly long amount of time to work through either.

The sub step that I found most helpful and important was the Define Problem step under the main step, Define.  It was the second to last step in that category and was a precursor for the final step.  Once the main problem was thought up, we had to write out “BLANK is a challenge for BLANK because BLANK.”  What I found most useful for this process is that due to the fact that I had so many possibilities and variations of those possibilities as to what the main problem really was that this helped me visualize it and zero in on one specific challenge that my partner was facing.

From defining our problem, we moved on to creating a HMW statement.  It stands for a “How Might We”.  Once the problem is established this helps to start coming up with solutions that may be relevant to the target problem.  This one didn’t seem as beneficial to the process as writing the problem, because it built off of it, but it was still good to have a clear statement written for me to go back to as I progressed.

To see more about my own design sprint, check out the following document: