One of the most valuable lessons I learned during our innovation bootcamp was learning about “bias towards action.” This particular point resonated with me, as I felt myself getting frazzled or anxious when Professor Luchs asked us to move onto the next step in design thinking, before I felt I had fully finished the previous step. I had a really hard time starting my prototype because I felt that I didn’t know my partner well enough – although prototyping is “not to finish, but to help develop” (Tim Brown), it was hard for me to commit to a model when I felt like I didn’t even have a grasp on the inspiration for my model. I’m sure it was an atypical time crunch, as we only had two class periods to finish the bootcamp, but that was my biggest challenge during the two class periods. I think this is because I tend to be a Type-A perfectionist. Obviously, it’s hard to achieve perfection over the span of three days in two class periods. I think that if we were to do this exercise again, I would try to shift gears a little better by trusting that the next step we were going to take “had value,” as we learned in the review of the bootcamp after class.
Another challenge I faced during the design thinking bootcamp was having “flexibility and comfort with ambiguity” (Design Thinking Chapter 1). As I touched on earlier, my Type-A personality had a hard time coming up with these innovations whose details were not only ambiguous, but my goals for the project itself weren’t fully formed. As we learned in class, I think it’s because I was using a more customer-centric and conventional approach to design; I was trying to make something to make or sell. Design thinking, on the other hand, is about learning and thinking, not necessarily letting the reality of your situation dictate your innovations.
Despite my inability to move on from step to step, I enjoyed working with Zach because he had a really different perspective than I did. He was more of a cerebral and abstract phone user and brought an interesting macro point of view on the innovation process. He wanted a phone that was more of an experience, rather than just another piece of technology. He pushed me to think outside of the typical boundaries of a cellphone and challenged my ideas, because I tended to think of ideas that I wanted in my phone, not necessarily features he was looking for. As I got to “collaborate across boundaries,” Zach helped push me to come up with a few unique ideas. Personally, I don’t think any of them were feasible, but it was a great place to start at for our bootcamp. In summation, although I felt I wasn’t successful at my first attempt of design thinking, I believe that with practice and an mindset adjustment I could be more effective at my next attempt 🙂