“[This program] introduced me to many new ways of thinking and taught me a lot about empathy’s importance in human-centered design. I learned a lot about the iterative process of design as well and look forward to applying what I have learned to future projects at the think[box].” – Workshop Participant – Winter Session 2021
Design thinking is a process and a mindset to understand people and their problems before developing the solutions. Human-centered design prioritizes empathy as a tool to better identify, understand and solve problems. Sears think[box] staff developed their own online human-centered design workshop for Case students and community members in response to the pandemic.
Sears think[box] completed another round of their human-centered design workshop throughout January 2021. The winter session workshops consisted of four groups led by Sears think[box] staff and student technicians: Ainsley Buckner, Richard Graham, Harrison Grubman, Ray Krajci and Massado Ngompe. The sessions were also supported by student technicians, Mark Vaughn and Dominique Yao. This was also the first time the workshop was made available to community users from the Greater Cleveland community.
Lead Engineer from medtech startup, Indago, Ilya Malinskiy, had this to say about his experience working with Ainsley and Ricky: “I found the HCDC workshop to be very helpful in expanding my approach to design thinking. The workshop taught a new approach to interviewing where we can take the information we received from the interviewee and apply it to designing an idea or product. The workshop also emphasized collaborative ideation, learning, and work, something that is especially hard to do when everyone is remotely participating. Once we worked through the initial interviews and ideation phases we were able to collaborate with the other students and the instructors on creating an initial prototype of an idea and presenting it as a group of interested people. Overall, the HCDC workshop was a positive experience in design thinking that has some great instructors.”
One of the workshop participants in another group used the design challenge to overcome difficulties in contacting potential mentors by designing template emails which she could use to quickly craft a personalized, professional email. Another participant used the design challenge to become more aware of her time and energy as she balanced being a parent, a PhD student, and a leader in her community.
The next human-centered design workshop is scheduled to run again during the summer semester in 2021.
Join the Sears think[box] group on Campus Groups to learn more about their programs and other offerings.