Design Challenge Part II - The First Week

This week, we have moved on to Design Challenge II - A mobile phone application.

 We've formed new groups for this Design Challenge - based on our personalities measured by the MBTI Test and a survey to calculate our respective "de Bono Hat" color.
In the first week, we have found our new team to work quite well, with the "Blue Hat" or leader of the group keeping the discussions alive with regular additions from everyone. There hasn't been any issues as of early on, which is always a promising sign for the success of the Design Challenge ahead.

This week we've started quickly with the "Ideating" Design thinking mode. We had briefly read the assignment and considered to brainstorm various application ideas using the "collaboration" design thinking mindset. We also utilized the "Empathizing" design thinking mindset as we thought of what iPhone users want or need in an application.
We continued to ideate ideas until the next team meeting where we pooled our ideas of the mobile app together and voted democratically on the two application ideas we believe to have to most potential to be popular and fit best within the user community.

The two application ideas were

1. Are You Hungry? - A budget food location service
2. Quick Details - A more grouped-based Contact List

After we had ideated our 2 mobile application ideas, we entered the "Prototype" design thinking mindsets where we were supposed to construct several low-fidelity prototypes of our respective application. At the next workshop, we will test our ideas with each other and the co-ordinator to decide on the idea to move forward with.

This week, the team had worked well together with every member doing their share of the workload. Our group had lacked the ability to correctly utilize the "define" design thinking mode as we brainstormed our application idea as we simply decided to create any application that would fill any need. If I had properly reminded the group to define a problem and create application ideas around that problem, the application ideas would have been more focused and be overall more productive.