Example Reflection – Visualization

Challenge:

I am a Third-year engineering student at a renowned university in India. I have always found out that  expressing my ideas and methodologies to my teachers just through vocal communication is very  difficult and many a time this happened that some of my ideas started getting rejected, but a similar  idea from one of my classmates was appreciated. I started feeling that I lacked speaking skills or maybe  had some issue with interacting with my teachers. But that wasn't the case! I already had received so  many prizes in debates, literature competitions and was a good orator. Then I thought why not find out  what was so special in that classmate of mine who was always successful in this. I understood that more  than the information, efficiently conveying them and to make others easily understand the thing was  the trick!

Selection:

The lack of creative content in my delivery of the thoughts made me try out the visualization design tool.  I felt that there couldn't be anything more apt than practically implementing this in everyday life. As I  selected visualization as my design thinking tool slowly and steadily, I started getting the positive results.

Application:

I tried making impressive PPTs, some project prototypes, drawings, 3D models, illustrations and much  more to explain my ideas to the class. It turned out that I was pretty good at making designs. Slowly I got  a hold on the aesthetics and started excelling in it. The second semester had just begun and as expected  the class teacher had asked us for a topic and idea for the semester project. I took 3 days to research  and finally came on a conclusion to do a project on "Hand gesture recognition for the deaf people." Tp  explain my views, I made an interactive presentation which consisted of hand gesture gifs, and I also  made an infographic to explain the chronology of the SDLC model that I would be using.

Insight:

My faculty was just astonished to see my exceptional work and she also sent my project for a national  competition which I won later! From that day onwards I understood that only having innovative ideas is  not enough but to express them in the best way possible. I learnt that visualization can really make our  concepts crystal clear and is much easier to grasp for others too. Not just presentations but the basic  geometric designs or even the freehand mappings we draw to explain our things can drastically change  the output of the process. I will also try incorporating more tools for better innovation and efficiency in  upcoming tasks.

Approach:

One addition to this could be adding more interesting tools like storytelling to connect with the  audience as well as the users. This would make a major impact on the deaf people as they would easily  understand whatever my app needed to convey through comic strips or maybe audio to text translator  for some inspirational stories that I might tell all other normal people. I feel every human in this world  equally deserves knowledge then why leave the specially-abled ones behind?

Thanking you   ;

Luz Young

