On June 4th, College of Management invited NPI to organize a one-day Design Thinking (DT) workshop, students coming from “Public Devoting Class”, “Entrepreneurship Elite Class” as well as 32 students major in public administration participated in this activity.
At 9 o’clock in the morning, after making some basic arrangements in the classroom, DT training was commenced. First, the students were divided into five groups, each student was asked to write down their expectations for this training. To ensure the effectiveness of training activities, each group was built with a staff member as a guide teacher to guide the whole group. After one presentation of training procedure and one warming-up game, "cotton candy battle", students came into contact with design thinking.
Design thinking is born to be an innovative methodology system that was built for the competitiveness of the project brand. By adopting DT, many social problems are able to find unique solutions, thus creating enormous social value. Through the analysis of specific cases, students are qualified to learn the basic steps of design thinking: understanding, observation, analysis, creativity, prototyping and testing. Day training is also carried out in accordance with this process.
This time, students in groups discussed the issue of school bus systems in SZU campus. With the understanding of the user, we can use the table of Charlotte, which contains the relational table of the user image, problem insight and the extreme user. Next step, the user observation, it can be carried out by adopting interview survey or direct observation. By the five principles of customer interviews, each group set up their own outline. During the lunch break, by doing field trips, the group members collected the user’s suggestions by interviewing the drivers, students and the school visitors.
In the afternoon, with the information collected, the analysis results was displayed according to the client travel map or customer stories. Next, creating a user, and then do a user focus, mainly by the user portraits , user needs analysis, insight into user needs and related resources. Then determine goals and brainstorm multiple solutions to put forward divergent thinking, mark the most effective, most likely, and the most creative ideas and so on. Ultimately, taken all of these, the prototypes was created and results were being tested.
NPI is an NGO which was started in 2006. With the mission, “helping social innovation, fostering public service personnel”, those grassroots social organizations and "social enterprises" are expected to be explored. Moreover, the NPI Firstly design "public incubator" mode, and successfully replicate in multiple cities nationwide, which is known as an important innovative system in the field of city construction. By expanding team spirits in the form of classroom training, The DT workshop stimulates students to participate in the entire process of design thinking, not only learning the basic theory, operational processes in practice, but also knowing how to apply design thinking to the project design.
