These past 2 weeks learning design thinking and analyzing Amsterdam through different lenses has been wonderful. It was a lot of fun to sit down and work with the UvA students on this design sprint. They provided great insights and ideas towards the project. Having people that knew the city and had a deeper insight on the issue that we were trying to address allowed us to get a better understanding of our problem. They helped us understand how the transportation system ran throughout the year and not just during our short stay. Using the additional knowledge that they provided we were able to better understand and tackle the issue of “increasing tourists use of public transportation”. The interviews went well and we were able to get good feedback from the people that we interviewed. We conducted 2 rounds of interviews with our first to understand more about the issue from the target audience, in our case, tourists. This interview process went fairly well and we were able to interview multiple groups of people. I was surprised at how willing people were to respond to our questions. The one experience that wasn’t too good was when we tried to interview the people working at the information desk and it went very negatively.
Something from this course that I feel was a key takeaway, was the process of taking the step back to look at more than just the problem but the context around it. The process of conducting research and then actually going out to the people who are experiencing the issue, and then analyzing their answers to see what the real issue is. In my other ENGI classes I feel as though it’s more research focused that interview and human centered. I felt like this new process allowed us to get a better grasp on what we were learning/ the problem.
This has been such a fun and great experience going through the process with the 2 groups of students. I feel as though I enjoyed the interview and interview analysis portion the most during the project. I enjoyed getting to speak to the people and hear their stories and get a deeper understanding of the problem from these different viewpoints. In addition, the analysis portion, looking at the stories that we listened to and finding underlying reasons for the issues that they might have faced was another portion that I did well in and enjoyed. I struggled with the next portions of developing ideas of solutions to the problem that we determined. I often found myself reaching mental blocks when brainstorming so I wasn’t able to develop a large number of solutions the first time around at UvA. The second time we did brainstorming it went much better especially by following the prompts like “What if the solution had to use magic”. I think that this step was most difficult at first because I was overcomplicating the process by checking the feasibility of the solution before throwing it out.
The highlight of the asynchronous activities for me was going about the city and just really getting to observe what was going on around me. The activities influenced me to disconnect from the rest of the world and really sit in my time in Amsterdam. It was such a great way to help me see how human centered design is all around us. A big highlight from our time in Amsterdam was spending time with the students and getting to know more about their lives, and presenting to the employees at ASML. Getting to present to the employees and hear about what they do was very informative for myself and fun to work with working employees as opposed to the students that we normally work with.
It has been a great time getting to go through the learning process while in Amsterdam immersed in a new culture and different way of thinking. I look forward to using the things that I learned from this course in my future engineering classes and in general life practice.
