Hello dear reader, this is part 2 of my blog from Amsterdam—or should I say Funsterdam. During my time here, I worked closely with University of Amsterdam students on my design challenge: sustainable tourism. The working process was fun, and I was surprised by the diversity of my group. We had locals and international students with different perspectives and experiences, and as a result, we successfully finished our design challenge. We explored the challenge with initial online research, creating a PESTLE table with relevant statistics, and then analyzed it to narrow down the scope of the project. Since our topic of sustainable tourism is broad, we focused on the business side of it and conducted team interviews. They were hugely successful and gave us even more specifics about the current challenge. However, after the interviews, we had some problems with the 5Ws.
Overall, it was a great experience. The Amsterdam course focused on design abilities, and we developed all of them. Before coming to Amsterdam, I thought of design—and especially design thinking—as something advanced and meant for people with a creative mindset. However, after spending two weeks in Amsterdam, I realized that’s not true. You can learn or develop them wherever and whenever.“Learn from others”—during my collaboration with UvA students, seminars at DB55, and the Design Thinking Company. “Build & craft intentionally”—from day one, film museum projects on making it more friendly for people with limited vision, to the final day and making a scavenger hunt of Amsterdam to help elderly businesses with my team.In addition, I realized how broad and narrow design can be. It can go from the literal meaning of the ability to developing it while seemingly doing another activity. I had learned some of these abilities in my other classes and courses, but this experience was more design-focused, and as a hard STEM major, it was definitely different in that sense. We got to meet and talk to various specialists, from bike designers to freelancers.
My favorite activity of the whole trip was definitely visiting the STRAAT Museum, the world’s largest graffiti museum. This was my first time ever visiting such a museum, and when they started explaining the art exhibitions there, I was mesmerized by it. After the personal tour, we got to create our own art. For a non-artistic person, it was a life-changing experience. Full freedom and no judgments resulted in pieces forever staying in my gallery favorites. I learned how to experiment rapidly, as I had to switch between graffiti colors, density, and application techniques within one hour to finish my piece.
The only question left unanswered for me was how to stay in the creative mindset and not become too biased. Designing something useful and unique is hard, and doing it consistently takes a lot. The design thinking company mentioned basic tricks, such as walking or listening to music. However, the question remained mostly unanswered, and I will keep asking it in the upcoming future. I wish I had focused more on answering it during my time in Amsterdam.
If the project were to continue for some time, my UvA team and I would have implemented a basic solution for sustainable tourism. I feel like I left a little too early, and they are still working on the project. I was there for the design but not the solution part. In addition, we could have expanded and covered all the design abilities. Since we only had 10 days of study time, we rushed through them and did most of it by ourselves. I liked the course, but it felt rushed at times or overly simplified because of it. I enjoyed the site visits, and maybe we could have visited other companies for our projects to get their opinions. Overall, the project would have been much nicer and more finalized if it had been implemented over a longer period.
Amsterdam challenged me in many ways, but I had some personal wins. In my opinion, I thrived during the idea generation part of the project. Coming in, I came up with two ideas in 10 minutes during the Film Museum visit. But after the most memorable lesson of Amsterdam—“Ideas should not always be achievable”—it clicked for me. I was able to let go of that limit and generated many ideas for all of my teams, especially with UvA students during the final poster lesson. We were tasked to create a poster of our challenge and the solution we were promoting, and most of it was based on my ideas.
However, I struggled heavily with the personal story assignment. It wasn’t the hardest assignment, but I struggled to choose a story in the first place since I had too many of them. Also, I went into too many unnecessary details, which killed the flow of the story. My reflection partner helped me figure it out, but I still lacked personality and storytelling skills, so I would need to work on them. It taught me to focus on that side—I can generate ideas and help my team that way, but in terms of social skills, like approaching someone on the street for an interview or telling a personal story, I could improve.
Aside from the course and its activities, I created so many “dad lore” moments. From visiting windmills and getting lost at the airport with a broken suitcase wheel to staying up late talking with my new friends. My personal favorite moment was biking all over Amsterdam for 2 hours and getting fries 1 minute before closing, then biking 5 miles just for those fries. They were AMAZING fries.
My number 1 tip for future Amsterdam ISEED students: pay 100% attention to the professor and every assignment. It might feel silly at first, but everything comes together in the end – you’ll have your own eureka moment. Enjoy every day, nap less, walk around the city, and bike
