Challenge

As a designer, I was always relied upon to create visualization or diverse levels of fidelity design  to visually illustrate a shared idea in most leadership roles I occupied back in the university. The  key significance of visualization is its ability to stimulate thinking and enhance dialogue. As a  new hall of residence executives back in the university, we were faced with the challenge of  salvaging an ailing student-run restaurant. Most of the newly admitted students were not  eating in the restaurant but were ordering food from outside the hall. This posed a slight  challenged to us since the administration had invested a lot in relocating it to a more  convenient spot in the hall.

Selection

During the discussion stage between hall administration, we the executives and some selected  students we in cooperated the stick figure sketches to give a seamless visual understanding to  almost everyone in the room. Four out of the five administrators were quite old and the  visualization was purposed for them to share in our views visually.

Application

At this stage I made sketches to illustrate the students journey from going out to buy till they  finally ate their food. In a form of journey mapping, I made sketches whiles we discuss what  could the possible challenge the students had and how we could solve it with very little  investment. After each sketch, I explained the possibilities and the changes that could be made.  As we Iterated at every stage of the students journey we understood what could be the  problem. There had been an influx of delivery services in the school and most restaurants  outside the halls also had their own delivery mechanism. Most of delivery services were timely  and had added value like picking up drinks from stores which was more affordable the  restaurant the student was ordering from. And most of these services were for free. Through  the visualization which more of infographic we all could vivid understand the students journey  and why they were not patronizing our restaurant. We later realized most they were also  sketching to bring new trends of ideas and new treats that were faced with.

Insight and Approach.

Though simple, making these stick figure sketches is very useful. I’ve been using it on several  projects which involves concepts and some level of visualization. It aids in getting a shared  understanding into a problem or solution. It also helps to brainstorm as much idea at a goal. At

this point of the discussion, we could highlight a lot of the challenges and solutions by  sketching. It also helped get the people engaged in the discussion. But During our discussion,  what I usually realize that someone who it lost is verbal conversation can quickly join and  understand where we are in the discussion. I use to have a problem of getting engrossed in  perfecting my sketches but as time went on it improve my simplicity.   I have come to  understand that stages like journey mapping and persona creation all need some level of  visualization during their explanation stage. Making simple sketches is necessary

