Experiences from the Asian Undergraduate Summit 2018

This past week, I was honored to lead a skills workshop at the 2018 Asian Undergraduate Summit overseas leg in Incheon National University. The summit, organized under the theme “Leadership in a Complex World: Taking on Diffused Responsibilities”, is a unique attempt at finding sustainable solutions to some of Asia’s most pressing societal challenges by bringing together undergraduates from diverse departments and countries. Utilizing models such as the Design Thinking Framework, the summit provides a platform for developing and testing out solutions to societal problems. Through my skills workshop, I sought to help the students reflect on their chosen problems, ideate with useful and constructive frameworks, and prepare to present their findings.

The Design Thinking Framework is a very useful problem-solving model employed by designers, managers, and essentially anyone who’s role entails offering products, services, and experiences to people. It has been popularized by IDEO, the design firm based in Palo Alto (and one of my favorite firms in the world). The model iteratively goes through 5 phases and progressively integrates feedback from users to create a user-centered solution. My skills workshop focused on the ideation phase of design thinking.

Ideation is the process of generating ideas of how the identified problem can be solved. There are numerous ways to ideate but I covered three approaches in my workshop; namely, How Might We Questions, SCAMPER, and Mash-Up. For each approach, we explored examples and understood our own practice assignments. During one of the exercises, a student shared an idea, “How might we design a watch that moves backwards in time and reminds us of our past experiences?” Interesting, wouldn’t you say?

Granted, ideas are just that – ideas. But, they are also the seed of our imaginations, the lifeline that powers our world. That’s why ideas can change the world. Like I averred to the summit participants, having multiple tools in your toolbox is a smarter option because when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. My advice was therefore that they pick up as many relevant tools as they could to solve the world’s very convoluted, systemic, and multi-dimensional problems.

Notes

1. What is Human-centered design? http://www.designkit.org/human-centered-design