#dt210

Task 5: SCAMPER

1: 

Design is a new skill that takes so much effort. Everyone designs something. Good designers seem to feel that the stuff they make just happens, they don't actually do anything “good” to make things.

Design is not making exactly what you need, it is making something better.

Many say that it comes naturally to them. Designing is intuitive.

Some design sects may say that you have to have rationale and understanding to design anything, to some, that is the key point. Sometimes this intuition is learned or something they just possess.

This intuition is actually a combination of many small educational moments contributing to an understanding that is formed before the designer consciously decides on anything.

Sometimes unhelpful things put together can overlap and outline a helpful thing.

This thinking process outlines that sometimes designers only really get to a result near the end of the creation process

2:

Thinking Hats basic premise being that one can use different perspectives to approach a problem and use the benefits of these perspectives to analyze it.

The hats are as follows

Blue Hat: Process, the hat that plans and organizes things.

White Hat: Neutral hat that looks objectively and uses data driven thinking.

Red Hat: Uses intuition and feelings to drive thinking.

Green Hat: Creative thinking with grand ideas and solutions to the problems of the black hat.

Yellow Hat: all of the positives and plus points. Why things are good. Uses logic.

Black Hat: all of the logical issues and weaknesses, as well as spotting the risks.

3:

It is key for designers to consider the way that the things they design will be used. A small percentage of people using these things will have the ideal physical functions to use them. A lot of what is designed is completely restricted to able bodied healthy humans.

TASK 2: THINKING HATS

- bravery

at the moment, I feel as though I have been very brave. For the time being at least, once could say that I am brave.

- creativity

currently my main limitation is time, although when not doing school work, I feel I am quite creative. Granted I have not shifting to creativity outside of my medium, I still feel very creative. I document these findings on my instagram

- curiosity

I love to learn and to understand more, but I feel that I do not learn enough out of my own knowledge circles. I need to invest more time into learning completely new things.

- flexibility

Traffic in Cape Town:

Blue hat: thinking about thinking, organizing, planning

-         Thinking of ways that traffic moves and how to organize where people are going.

-         Why are people moving at these times?

White hat: information and data statistics

-         How many people are moving at this time?

-         Max cars on road before backups

-         Time cost to drive in traffic vs to wait for traffic to end

Red hat: feelings, intuition and gut

-         First thoughts to go early and to go late

-         When in traffic one feels the desire to take the first rat run away to get away. Even if it takes longer, they are happy to move

Green hat: ideas and brainstorming

-         Traffic in waves rolling through area.

-         Carpooling

-         Replacing highways with trainlines for cars

-         Swapping houses to proximity of work

Yellow hat: positives and all plus points

-         Removes traffic problem

-         Works out that everyone spends as little time between work and home

Black hat: negatives

-         Interrupts privacy and workflow that people have worked up

-         Hard to adapt a system that formed naturally, as that is normally the ideal situation

What worked?

Separating the ideation process from criticism allows one to move to a different level of ideation that creates “irrational” ideas that can be refined to a more probable final spot without being limited by the rational constraints of their conception.

What didn’t work?

The realistic solutions to the problem are harder to decipher, especially when it comes to adjusting systems that already exist, as the contrast of the concrete system and the irrational solution do not work well together all the time.

How could the thinking-process be improved?

While rapid fire ideation is good, the optimal way to do it would be to combined 2 or 3 of the hats to ideate without so much hypothetical “waste.”

Which one of the hats felt quite natural/comfortable to wear?

As a general rule, the black feels most natural as design students, as we are acquainted to posturing to identify pain points to solve them.

Which hat was hard to put on?

A world where Lewis Latimer was accurately credited for his work on the creation of the lightbulb and the telephone. The lack of this credit showcases a system, where black inventors are taken advantage of and, in a lot of cases erased from the main course of history.

While Latimer was the person who contributed largely to the creation of the lightbulb, as well as the securing of the patent, he was not credited as the man who created the lightbulb. He did not limit his inventions to just the lighbulb, but had also created plans for an improved railroad bathroom, and an early day air conditioning unit.

In recognition that I cannot achieve this goal alone, I choose to

Be truthful and direct with others in a respectful manner

Receive feedback as valuable and essential to the progress of the project 

Trust that my collaborators want this project to succeed as much as I do