Challenge: I am a first year university student in London looking to make the most out of my higher- education experience. Although my challenge may seem a bit different and not so much business-oriented, I personally believe that design thinking can be applied in all aspects of our lives which is why I have the chosen the following prompt. Throughout my first months at university, I rarely had an enjoyable night out, whether it be in a pub, a student night-club or organised events. I was frustrated and disappointed that I was not going to enjoy my social experiences as much as I initially thought which left me wanting to create my own event. Since then, I have partnered up with my course-mate to create our project: Youphoria, which is still very new and has a long way to go before our first event. The biggest challenge we have encountered in planning our event is the way in which we will convey that our event will be different to present events. We want to deliver a service which adheres to customer wants that they currently cannot experience in London nightlife and capitalize on what makes it special.   Selection of Design Thinking Tool Due to the nature of my challenge, I found that the visualization tool learned in Week 1 will especially help in overcoming our obstacle in trying to find creative ways in order to differentiate the service we will be offering as opposed to ones offered by current competitors. I believe that the visualization tool will help us think in a non-verbal way and help us realise that limiting ourselves to language for communication will not bring us very far in trying to understand each other’s vision and end-goal for the project, therefore removing the obstacle of miss-communication and miss-interpretation as well as fuelling our projects full of creative and eccentric ideas.   Application In the beginning, we organised a workshop which sought to capture the general feeling our fellow-university students seek when going on a night-out in London. In order to get the above data, we decided to organise a workshop by inviting 6 of our friends and asked them to list out the top 3 emotions they were looking to experience on a night out as well as the top 3 emotions they generally have felt in the past. This resulted in finding some general patterns of students feeling claustrophobic, disappointed and not meeting initial expectations during an everyday night out, as well as wanting to look for a euphoric, ambient and comfortable experience in their ideal night out. Although we did get some good results in finding a general trend that students were disappointed with current night outs and seek similar feelings that they are not currently experiencing, we were still lost in finding ways to differentiate our event from current ones alongside responding to the wants and expectations of students on a night out in London. This is where I decided to apply the visualization tool in a second workshop, where I believed that getting students to draw out their ideal night-out, with colours, words, emotions, and then describe each drawing, we would be able to better comprehend what these students are specifically looking for in an exceptional social event. We therefore organised such workshop relatively soon after the first one where we asked 6 students to draw out their ideal night-out for as long as they wanted to and then have a sit- down meeting where students would present their visions individually to the group with their drawing as the main focal point of their presentation. Following the workshop, we had a better understanding of what they were looking for in an ideal night-out. Through the presentations, my partner and I were able to identify four main factors which we will be building on to organise our events, the first being genre of music, followed by location, decoration and finally, ambiance/atmosphere of the event.   Insight Through the use of the visualization tool, my partner and I were able to better understand not only what students felt was lacking in the events they attended throughout the year, but also understood which angles to capitalize on during the development of our project. Without this tool, we would not have been able to identify clearly what students were feeling during current night-outs as we understood that words cannot convey feeling as much as we thought it would. The drawings created by the 6 students not only gave us ideas about how we

understood which angles to capitalize on during the development of our project. Without this tool, we would not have been able to identify clearly what students were feeling during current night-outs as we understood that words cannot convey feeling as much as we thought it would. The drawings created by the 6 students not only gave us ideas about how we personally visualized the project, but the description of each of their drawings seriously helped us identify what these students felt needed to be improved which we concluded were the quality and genres of songs; the way in which DJs made transitions between songs and genres and at which point during the night; the type of decorations and how they should only be there to improve the general atmosphere of the area instead of confusing the crowd; the type of location that is ideal for such an event: one with a terrace and two different rooms; and finally the price of the event, which needs to be affordable for university students living on tight budgets. Without this course, I would not have thought outside the box creatively to seek and understand what my customer’s wants are and what why these wants are not currently met. Now that we understand the above, we are able to advance with the development of our project.   Approach Now that I have implemented one of the 4 design thinking tools learned throughout this course and have experienced the benefits which come from using such techniques and general thought-process, I am sure to continuously make use of these techniques. Another aspect of my life in which I believe visualization will help me is that of my job as an event planner in an economics society at my university. Our goals are to find out what connections, experiences, information, talks students are looking for before they begin their professional lives and believe that getting students to draw out what their ideal vocational paths look like in order for us to then analyse their descriptions of their drawings and then support them in any way we can, but in a better way, as it will permit us to strongly grasp what students are looking for in our society, and how they want us to help them set them up on their path to success as opposed to filling out general surveys for us to then make blind decisions about what is best for the students through only using personal experiences and aspirations of team- members.

