A role play on Design Thinking at Alliance University ..

Design Thinking comprises of a set of skills by which one is able to solve complex design problems and come up with innovative practical and economical solutions.

Though the process has been developed by David Kelly of IDEO, Professor at Stanford D-school, IDEO CEO has come with an interesting article in HBR in 2008.  Click here for my earlier writing on a Design Thinking Workshop at AU.

This write up is regarding a classroom Design Thinking exercise we had with students of sem 3 MBA on 9 June 2020, through the online mode. These days because of the Corona scare, all classes are happening virtually online through the MS TEAMS setup in AU.

We started with the empathising phase, which involves everyone in the exercise introducing themselves with an introduction, which essentially is the narration of an unfortunate event in the life of the participant till that time. The main purpose of this step is to ensure that the participant is able to recollect realistic situations with the deep meanings in the expressions and narration.

We entered the definition phase by identifying the problem we were going to work on. The issue of traffic congestion in different parts of Bangalore city was the one that came to our mind. We decided to do a design thinking exercise to find out the reasons why traffic congestion is high in Silk Board junction in Bangalore and possible steps to counter it.

In the next phase of Ideation, we embarked on a Brainstorming exercise to find out possible means by which traffic congestion could be reduced at Silk Board junction in Bangalore.

The brainstorming session created about 18 ideas with 3 rounds of 6 teams each, and then we narrowed down into 3 top ideas.

In the Prototype phase, we thought about the different steps that could be taken up to get the plan implemented. Since providing good connectivity between Metro and BMTC was one of the final 3 ideas that came up, we decided to ask govt and BMTC, Metro etc to have dedicated teams that would work to improve the connectivity between Metro and BMTC across Bangalore.

One the Govt accepts our recommendations, we are sure the traffic congestion issue in Bangalore, Silk Board junction will be solved to come etxnet, at least. .