Week #4

    On Tuesday we had a guest speaker, Brother Julander who spoke to us about Design Thinking and Innovation. First of all, what is Design Thinking? On the website, http://www.byui.edu/clusters/design-thinking/what-is-design-thinking the definition is written as follows, "In a nutshell, Design Thinking is a human-centered approach to solving problems. It uses an organized method of defining the problem through observing and empathizing with the people who are impacted by it, generating multiple solutions, prototyping one of the solutions, and then testing it." The five things that go into design thinking, which are mentioned in the definition that go into design thinking are empathy, define, ideate, prototype, and test. In my opinion, empathy is the beginning to a solid idea to solve problems. The reason I think this is because in order to get to the root of any problem you'll have to be "in" the problem and not just see it "from" it's perspective. 

    I believe that all the steps to the human-centered design is necessary because it puts you in the right mind-set before going into a project. With empathy you're able to understand to a greater degree of what the problem or solution may be, then you're able to define it in a way you're able to have the meat and core of the project. Once that takes place it's time to brainstorm and search for every possible problem and answer. The prototypes are necessary because you're able to see what works and what doesn't for the design. And obviously testing the solution is essential in order to see what needs to happen to change and tweak. 

    Creative Confidence is essential to social innovation because I believe we can all come up with ideas that will lead to good solutions, but sometimes we're too afraid to even speak our mind. Creative confidence is important in my life because I've seen how it's affected my creative abilities at times. There have been times when I would have mind road blocks because I felt like my ideas would be put down every time. With social innovation we need creative juices to be flowing because the issues and concerns of today's world are not easy to solve. We can't do the same things we've been doing all these years and in some cases we need to start from ground zero. Things are constantly changing and if we don't have creative confidence we will never be able to solve the big and small problems of today's world.