The session organized by Ashesi D: Lab in collaboration with the Ashesi Leo Club and Youth Opportunities Ghana on Saturday the 6th of November was meant to enlighten participants on this incredible problem-solving tool, Design Thinking, and to help them practice the concepts learned during the workshop via a team problem-solving task. The goal was to make sure participants come out of it with solid grounding and understanding of Design Thinking.
During the session, design thinking was defined as a non- linear, iterative process that teams use to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions to prototype and test. It involves five phases; empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test. It is most useful to tackle problems that are ill-defined or unknown.
Manuella Sekyi took the wheel in helping the participants understand more about the design thinking process. The first step she took the participants through was defining the problem. Getting to understand your problem and being able to see the clearer picture of the problem was important. The tools listed that could be used in mapping out the scope of the problem include fish diagram/Ishikawa diagram, observing and synthesizing, spider diagram, tree diagram and the 2 x 2 matrix.
Later, an example to this design thinking process was carried out. The problem of high death rates of premature births was focused on. A tree diagram was used as the mapping tool to help students understand better. With the tree diagram, the problem was broken down to find some of the root causes. Some of the causes that were found include education and communication barriers, cost barriers, cultural beliefs and practices barrier, fear, judgement by society, lack of education, low wages for work done, lack of investment in underdeveloped communities, lack of water and other amenities in undeveloped rural communities, roads in undeveloped communities not prioritized, hence delay in accessing health facilities.
The next step was referred to as problem reframing. Here, participants were required to identify causes to the problem and list some of the effects that these causes had to those involved. This required that they also identify the stakeholders involved in the problem. Who are some of the stakeholders involved in the cause of the problem? Who are the stakeholders affected by the problem? Having identified these, it would be easy to them define your problem statement.
Having been equipped with these, participants were again taken through an exercise where they got to be divided into different breakout rooms. Each breakout room was given a different problem from other rooms to work on. Like in the example, students had to first break down the problem and identify the root causes, identify the stakeholders, organize questions for the stakeholders; questions to ask the stakeholders before, during and after the problem manifests.
The research protocol that was suggested to help with solving the problem involved, using reframed questions (use of ‘how’ questions), understanding the user or affected (high, low or non-income earner), and identifying the sampling method to be used. The participants also got to learn more on using an empathy map. An empathy map is a collaborative tool teams can use to gain a deeper insight into their customers. Much like a user persona, an empathy map can represent a group of users such as a customer segment. What does the consumer think and feel? What does the consumer feel? What does the consumer say and do? What does the consumer hear? These are some of the questions necessary for the empathy map.
Participants were later encouraged to develop their point of view on the problem as it their unique design vision that is crafted based on the discoveries made while carrying out the empathy map exercise. On ideations, brainstorming is done on ideas that could help solve the problem. This leads to coming up with various prototypes that would need to be tested to figure whether they do answer the problem. The session was later concluded with presentations from each breakout room on the ideations they came up with and any prototypes they thought of to help solve the problem they were each assigned with. The session ended with remarks from Manuella Sekyi who thanked everyone who participated in the exercise, concluding the meeting at around 6pm.
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