My Day at a Design Thinking Workshop Dieter Rams, the famous designer, says “Good Design is as little design as possible”. I came closer to understanding what he meant when I attended the Pre-Conference Design thinking workshop organized by “Women in Data science”, Pune. Obviously, the facilitators were two women from IBM, Pune: Maithili Prabhu, an architect and a designer by training, and Dhanashri Srivastava, a software engineer, turned Usability expert. The workshop was about the widely used ‘Infinity Process’ - the iterative design thinking process. The process focuses on the following actions: 1. Empathize, 2. Define, 3. Ideate, 4. Prototype, 5. Test I enjoyed the workshop and thought I should outline my positive and fulfilling experience here. The workshop was conducted as learning groups of 6-8 people each. Our group was so excited about the Infinity process that we even made pun out of it and called our team as "8 is great” (a play on the “∞” sign.) We then focused on applying the Infinity process in a group setup. Each group had to formulate a problem statement around the theme of ‘Safety’. The problem statements were in the form of "Make --- safer for ---“. e.g. Make ‘roads’ safer for ‘senior citizens’, make ‘toys’ safer for ‘young children’ etc. The “8 is great” team chose the statement: Make ‘oceans’ safer for ‘humanity’. At the face of it, the problem statement looked very vast. But the trainers assured us that we would be able to come up with a solution for at least part of the problem by end of the day. As part of the ‘Empathize’ step each team had to create a "persona" who gets affected by the problem and write down about him/her. We chose our persona as Lakshmi who owns a fishing industry. Because of all the pollutants and plastic being thrown into sea water, her industry is affected in a huge way. She's not getting a healthy catch. There is a lot of wastage of resources. In spite of increasing the number of boats, the catch is reduced year by year. It is getting difficult for her to fulfill the customers' demands. It is challenging to keep her employees happy since her profit margins are reducing. Overall, Lakshmi is fighting on multiple fronts to keep her business thriving. After coming up with a persona, each team had to write what their persona: 1. does, 2. feels, 3. thinks, and 4. says Using these four types of actions, we created the ‘Empathy Map’ for our persona. After this, we had to think about "a day in the life of Lakshmi, the fishing industrialist" and come up with a ‘Journey Map’ for her. Since our problem statement was quite generic, we narrowed down to solving the problem of plastic entering the fishing zones affecting the quality and quantity of catch. After the voting and coming up with the problem statement to solve in the near future, we were asked to come up with at least 2-3 "How might we" questions for our problem. Again, we would vote on the most important one and look for solution of that question. For Lakshmi, the most important issue was the quality of the catch. So, we voted for "How might we stop plastic from entering the fishing zones so that Lakshmi is able to deliver healthy fish to her customers?" For the ideation step, each of the team members had to come up with at least 3 "big ideas" to solve the problem. Each idea should have a name/title, a statement and a drawing to accompany it. We were encouraged to come up with at least one absurd idea! Why not? We all know that more often than not, the most absurd idea takes shape into an effective solution! Again, using voting dots, each team finalized on one big idea to solve the problem. For my team, the idea was to invent an Internet-Of-Things based mechanism to track each piece of plastic entering the oceans and to return that piece to the offender! We further explored our big idea by 'story boarding'. Each of us drew pictures with actors and speech-bubbles (like a comic strip) on 6 post-its stuck onto a paper; our own interpretation of the big idea! Again, we voted on the best story from the team and were ready to present and rationalize it before the audience. The last step in the workshop was the "playback" of all the steps. We were given 15 minutes to brainstorm on how we would present our problem, persona, idea and solution. My team decided to present it as a skit with each team member playing a part of a stakeholder in the problem statement. It was fun to quickly decide on the parts and come up with dialogs for the skit. All in all, it was a very productive, informative and hands-on workshop! There was not a single dull moment! :-) Thanks to Thoughtworks, Pune for making their facilities available and providing beverages with a hearty vegetarian meal. Also, thanks to the ambassadors of "Women in Data Science, Pune" for thinking through the required steps for a beginner to learn data science and arranging these workshops as a build-up to the conference.