1. 1. My Three Key Learnings froM Design thinking innovation: Don’t be afraid to fail. Failure makes you think about your ideas in a different way. It helps you to go on other paths of exploring. Empathy. I got a real understanding about how using empathy can aid in solving problems. Using empathy when interviewing someone made me focus in on the small aspects of solving things by talking to people and listening to what they had to say. Ideate. I learned how to brainstorm in a better and more fruitful way. Thinking about coming up with ideas from different vantage points was a real insight. Often, I rely on ideas that are the most obvious, but my prototype ideas came from thinking like a 5-year old.

3. reflection on how To apply Design Thinking To My workplace: I work in a creative services office composed of designers, writers, photographers, and videographers. While we do practice brainstorming, Design Thinking gave me insights on how to make those sessions more fruitful. We did have a brainstorm meeting during my second week of taking this class. I made everyone stand up and use post-it notes to help us with our ideas. And it worked! Standing provides a more interactive environment than sitting and posting ideas to a white board encouraged further interactivity among the team. Design Thinking made me want to share the ideas I learned in the course and how I could apply it to improve our problem-solving processes. While we do already think of creative solutions for problems, the techniques of finding empathy, creating a problem statement, forming ideas, and then making prototypes, will help my team to come up with better solutions. Here is my list of Ideas: • Share my learnings with colleagues. • Give a talk during a staff meeting about each of the steps in Design Thinking. • Interview readers of the publications that I work on as a designer to find out what they like and what they don’t like. • Sketch more to make prototypes. • Give out candy rewards whenever colleagues use these techniques to solve problems. • Make a prototype area with simple to tools like the d.School has. Here are my 3 ideas that I would further prototype and test: • Share my learnings with colleagues. At the end of our weekly production meeting, I could go over one of each area that I learned about. • Make a list or write a summary of how to make brainstorming meetings more productive and share it with the entire Marketing Division in one of our monthly meetings. • Make a prototype area that has tools for ideating. Include things like colored post-it notes, colored pencils and markers, different papers, pipe cleaners, magazines, etc. Taking this course has led me to think more broadly about how I solve problems as a designer. I always have many ideas to solve something, but having that empathy for my stakeholder, or who my audience is for a particular project will help me to come up with better ideas that are more relevant. Making a prototype and testing it will further help me with solving design challenges.

