REFLECTION (Visualization)

Challenge and Selection

I chose Visualization or Visual Thinking as a tool because this is the most efficient method of thinking for me.  Basically, visual thinking is a process of thinking with pictures in mind. In most cases, I represent ideas  visually so that I could have a better grasp on it. That enables me to better explain my thoughts as well. With  an ample time, I can organize these small ideas to form a bigger one. Though it is quite a common approach  to many people, I do use it more often, because I could think faster this way. I often use balloons to represent  my ideas and connect the relative ones to each other.

Since I am still a student, there are a ton of brainstorming activities within the class, visual thinking helps a  lot in the process. I usually ask my classmates about what they think and carefully assess their ideas, like  putting myself in their boots to be able to have a good grasp about their thoughts. This enables me to dive in  to their understanding and relating and comparing these ideas to mine.

Application

I am currently taking my Design Project course where, I think, Design Thinking would be a great tool to  making it successful. In our Design Project course, we were required to search for problem in the society that  we may give technological solution to.

Before starting my Design Project, I asked myself the general question, “What are the problems in the society  that needs solution?” In correspondence to the question, “what is?”, by Design Thinking. I narrowed down  certain topics in the society that may be in need of an innovation such as agriculture, power, security, and  medicine. I chose medicine linked under it is biomedical instrumentation, where measuring devices were  used to monitor patients in the hospital or clinics. With an area of specialization in mind, I started with  searching for study materials that were involved in hospitals and caregiving. Sorting out these materials I  found out that many nurses suffer from physical injuries during caregiving. I narrowed down the causes of  these injuries to find the specific problem. After that, I interviewed hospital staff and nurses about this for a  more in depth understanding of the problem.

The process I had done on finding the problem in my Design Project is straight thinking. I tried to avoid  branching out to unnecessary ideas thus considering only what were vital. However, the other ideas were  kept because of a strong connection to the problem and the solution.

Insight and Approach

As an interviewer, there is a need to me to point my interviewees to the real problems that they had. So, I  devised some questions that will lead me to their problem. With this I ensure that I can correctly address their  need and create a solution, which will be my Design Project, to their problem.

The most important value I learned from this method is to focus on the problem. Carefully assessing the  information obtained from the people that were interviewed to draft a solution that will directly hit the problem  as well as their need.

