I got interested in a book that was shared by one of my peers, ‘The Field Guide to Human Centered Designs’ by IDEO. According to the book, no matter what sort of design challenge we face, we will have to go through three main phases.

 

Inspiration

In this phase, you’ll learn how to better understand people. You’ll observe their lives, hear their hopes and desires, and get smart on your challenge.

Ideation

Here you’ll make sense of everything that you’ve heard, generate tons of ideas, identify opportunities for design, and test and refine your solutions.

Implementation

Now is your chance to bring your solution to life. You’ll figure out how to get your idea to market and how to maximize its impact in the world.

 

IDEO.org uses this approach of human centered design to tackle various design challenges of projects ranging from social enterprise to communication to medical field. Hopefully by following through the guidance of IDEO’s method, my group will be able to build deep empathy with individuals from the Asylum Seekers Project and take what we have learnt to design a new solution for Lentara. We will be able to build and test our ideas before reaching out to the world.