Application of Desighn Thinking

By Ana Sofia Rayo

Selection: Our challenge was to help as many commercial establishments as possible, families who  live from day to day and with the pandemic their income had decreased to the maximum, this due  to the fact that people no longer go out to shop, as they do not want to expose themselves to  contagion.

This exercise posed a specific challenge, since i) the crisis was affecting a large population of  citizens, ii) we were confined to our homes due to the pandemic, iii) the team could not travel and  we could only help through the internet, iv). Information gathering could only be done with those  people who had an internet connection, and those who did not could not access them.

Application:

We got together with a group of friends to brainstorm, first we analyzed the issues, then for each  issue we did a root cause analysis, at this stage we realized that our analysis was not enough and  we needed to get the people in the community involved and we had to ask them the root causes  of the issues. The exercise was fantastic because due to that same analysis also emerged proposals  for solutions that allowed us to work on the most viable solutions that generated satisfaction to  the community.

Perspective:

The amazing thing about using the tool, is that we as a team initially envisioned the solution to be  the one we wanted to put forward, however the solution went beyond that by engaging the  needs, perspectives, and solutions that the community itself provided. We worked hard, and we  hope to soon begin to see the results that will allow us to see that families are moving forward and  improved the results and income of their commercial establishments.

Approach:

For an upcoming exercise I hope to have technological tools that will allow me to collect the  information in a time-efficient way, since collecting the information on paper and then taking it to  the computer generates extra work to proceed with the respective analysis.

