Design Thinking workshop at Alliance University

David Kelley, Stanford D-School

As part of the Open Forum of Alliance University, today we did an Open Forum on Design Thinking on Friday, 28 June 2019. Click here for the article by Tim Brown in HBR ..

Prof. Sukanya Kundu in the Operations area led the discussion on Design Thinking which was followed by Prof. George Easaw taking over with some explanation and characteristics of Wicked problems. Wicked problems as different from tamed problems, do not have a single, simple solution, it is dynamic and the optimal points can change over time. Mail me for a of my presentation ..

David Kelley of the Stanford Design School is the founder of Ideo and one of the contemporary proponents of Design Thinking. Design Thinking has it's origins from 1951 with JJ Gordon ('61) and Alex Osborn ('63) being some of the earliest proponents of the creative design process.

Design Thinking essentially takes an systematic approach which has five/six stages.

• Empathise
• Define
• Ideate
• Prototype
• Test
• Launch    (though this stage is not popular, it puts the final idea into action).

We straightaway got into carrying out a Design Thinking (DT) project. We had the issue of the Crippling Drinking water crisis in Bangalore as a problem for which we had to target plausible, creative and interesting solutions. 

Empathise : We had a novel approach for the intro to the empathising activity. Every member taking part  had to give a small self-introduction and narrate an unfortunate and sad event of their life. This was done in the introduction stage to instill an empathising and self involving approach.

Different stages in Design Thinking starting with empathize .

Participants of the workshop narrated touching, moving incidents in their life, like escaping from a very serious air accident in Arabia, to being involved in a serious bus accident, to having a serious and crippling low back-ache, novel challenging and professionally threatening work experiences at the first job.

The purpose of the empathising act is to ensure that all the participants are at ground zero and hence are able to carry out the other stages of defining and ideation well. Once the initial empathising preparation exercise was done, the participants got into the shoes of the public and actually defined the problem well.

Define : The issues faced by the people of Bangalore of drinking water actually was defined as the problem of wise usage of water for the daily needs of the citizens.

Ideate : After having defined the problem we next tried to come out with ideas to solve the water crisis in Bangalore through a Brain Storming exercise.  Click here to understand Brainstorming approach developed by Nobel Prize winner Dr. Roger Sperry from Caltech, which is one of the basic components of Design Thinking .. 

The members were asked to give innovative suggestions for solving the water crisis that is crippling Bangalore, saving water in the city of Bangalore.

The participants gave very insightful recommendations to solve the water crisis. They are listed here for the benefit of the participants (red indicates the most repeated and important ones as agreed by the participants)

1. Building construction is a cause for water crisis. Stop building construction. 

2. Leakage of water to be stopped from leaking pipes and taps 

3. Deploy Rainwater Harvesting in homes 

4. Washing of cars from municipal / borewell water to be done less frequently 

5. Reverse Osmosis to be made available in all homes 

6. Reclaim / save water bodies  

7. Deploy Rain water harvesting on rooftops in homes

8. Recycling water from kitchen etc 

9. Creating awareness on conserving water 

10. Sensitise industries to use less water 

11. Reduce construction activities 

12. Lakes that have been leveled for construction activities should be reclaimed and allowed to fill with water 

13. Companies should meet their water needs from their personal resources and by recycling 

14. Recycling of waste water by every apartment building

15. Use showers less for bathing, use buckets

16. Use grey water for gardening and toilet uses

17. Have variable capacity flush in toilets

18. Reduce cemented floors to reduce storm water generation

19. Deploy better storm water drainage to allow water to permeate to the ground

If we look at the quality of the ideas that evolved during the ideation session, the better quality ideas we find was because of the initial empathising exercise where the participants empathised with the citizens of Bangalore and understood their problem of drinking water crisis well. 

The quality and quantity of the ideas and the discussion we found was quite good. We intend to communicate this to the city infrastructure and municipal authorities.

Prototyping and testing is outside our control. It will be done later as this is a large wicked problem which does not have an exact solution and can have very dynamic solutions.

George