Project Description
Project Description
DESIGN THINKING
You’re heading into 100 days of challenge, delight, chaos and triumph. That’s the design process in a nutshell. If you want to be a rock star product designer, then you’ll have to adopt a growth mindset and allow yourself to get messy, to experiment, to try new thing, to make mistakes, and to fail.
“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
Steve Jobs, AppleWhat it is.
Design thinking is an approach to problem solving. We’re not here to make pretty pictures or pick the perfect palette. We’re here to find problems and solve them. To invent and create — and yes, to make pretty pictures and pick the perfect palette, but after we’ve solved the problems.
The design process is chaotic, until it’s not.
Design thinking is a squiggly line of chaos and confusion as you sort through options, solutions and better solutions and finally come up with the single best solution.
How it’s used.
Designers use it as a way to make space for them to experiment and play. To give themselves permission to try something crazy without worrying whether anyone will like it. It’s an iterative approach to design.
”Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. What I’ve learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head.”
Anne Lamott, Bird by BirdDiscussion.
Good product designers work iteratively. That means we try one thing, hate it and throw it away, try something else, hate that too. Then realize that the first thing we tried was the right thing.
We don’t expect to have all the correct answers on the first day.
We do get started immediately, with pen to paper. Or stylus to tablet; cursor to screen. Because we know that nothing is more terrible than that blank screen. Once we have something to work with, we can adapt, change, amend, tweak and edit to our heart’s delight. Getting started is the real task.
Design is in the doing, not the pondering. So don’t ponder too long. Get started NOW. And embrace your imperfections.
”Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”
Albert EinsteinObjectives
Understand design thinking
Play, create, experiment
Share your work with others
Tips & Tricks
Think about
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Letting go of your ego – ego destroys creativity.
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Getting started. The blank screen is the hardest part.
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Share your work. If you can’t show it to the world, you are not a designer.
Resources
Your Assignment
Use design thinking to invent something new.
It can be anything you want, as long as you’ve written it down somehow.
- It could be a new way to get to school
- It could be a time travel machine
- It could be an app that finds people to socialize with in your neighborhood
- It could be a personal jetpack that fits in a backpack <—somebody please invent this
Be as detailed as you can. Make sketches, include the user interface, try to think of ways it can really work.
I really like your website and am going to start your 100 Day “Challenge” Today!
I’m not sure, if I’ll manage to do one per day, and whether all of them are relevant to me (I’m not as much into User Interfaces) but I’m looking forward to your next Updates!
Keep up the good work,
with lots of love
Anna
I invented an app for “rosemary thieves”. Noone should ever have to buy rosemary, so the app shows you where you can easily go and and snip a branch off to use in your cooking
this is great! do you have an email list?
Well I am getting hyped up now, I am ready to complete the first assignment so keep on doing the great job. Cheers
This is just what I’ve needed at the moment.
I’ve finished some UX courses, done some UI Challenges but was lacking the courage to actually start something.
Having in mind that I absolutely loved the first lesson,
I will try my best to do the whole 100days of product design challenge here!
Let’s put something on the paper and freakout in the meantime of making something innovative!
Thanks for this one.
R
very good !Thank you
I invented ‘GreenGo’, an app that connects you to rural communities/farmers and local businesses for natural goods or items made of sustainable resources.
The app allows the user to search through his/her interests: plants, flowers, vegetables, cereals, seeds, clothes, indoor items… anything you can imagine!
With the geolocation function, user can find nearby spots. Users can rate their shop experience so it can help other users and help create a safe and collaborate platform.
Users can also ‘favorite’ interesting items and in the ‘explore’ section, can find new brands/businesses in the app, best rated items & best sellers and also exclusive stories from the communities or brands.
For the farmers, businesses and brands, this would be a marketplace to announce their goods and they would have to proof their sustainable business model with a certification.
With a low and fair take rate, they could join the community and open their doors to more people.
I love this concept!
Thank you for this , I am officially starting my 100 day challenge as of today (6th of May)
I am a creative learner for a company and I need to be accepted by my agency as a competent employee for design and conceptualization.
I’ve always been a visual artist but its time I take my creativity to a new platform and blow the world away with the ideas ,concepts and authenticity I have to offer.
Good for you—you can do it!
So the problem that I wanted to tackle is:”how to develop the abilities necessary for work without being in the industry yet?”. In my case, I am an engineer, but I would love to work with design. I have taken into consideration the “Slight Edge” theory which says that if you do a lit bit more today than the day before it, not skipping any days, you are gonna succeed at it. So I came up with a journal in which each day builds upon the day before. But there is more to it: there has to be effort to do something that is outside your currently comfort zone and you gotta tell a group of friends about this because we tend to engage and feel more committed that way.
The problem I’m tackling is concerning how money is being deducted from our account based on subscriptions that we have applied to. Probably, we might have forgotten that we have applied to such subscriptions based on its irrelevance or it’s no longer of use to us again and this tends to cause a great problem being that the subscription is still active. As a result of this, money is being deducted regularly without knowing what’s going on.
So, I thought of creating a product that can help track and manage these subscriptions and also be as a reminder to when the subscription is due.