On August 16, 2024, we had our Design Thinking Workshop at JIMS, Sector 5, Rohini. The session began at 1:45 p.m. and ended at 5 p.m. Mr. Gaurav Vashishth, the founder of Green Decore and a proud PGDM 2004–06 batch alumni, led the facilitation.
First-year PGDM students studying Retail Management were the ambience to receive thorough insights on the subject of Design Thinking from this workshop. The guest began by defining the term Design Thinking and discussing how modern firms are using it to their advantage. As we went along, we had conversations about a number of related subtopics, such as problem solving and using the Design Thinking method to find solutions. Mr. Vashishth provided numerous instances of prosperous Indian businesspeople, including Bhavesh Aggarwal, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, and Ritesh Aggarwal. Furthermore he offered the crucial insight that a person’s age is simply a number and does not indicate their level of maturity.
We then participated in a group exercise on creative and inventive thinking after learning what design thinking was. The goal of this exercise was to locate numeric and alphabetic patterns throughout the college campus.
Following this exercise, Mr. Vashishth offered us a series of questions to test our ability to reason logically. After then, we discussed the answers to these questions. After delving more into the ideas behind Design Thinking, we learned about the ASK Principle, an acronym for Attitude, Skill, and Knowledge. The most crucial element among the three is Attitude. We also talked about how crucial it is to pick your idol carefully in today’s world. Arunima Sinha and Dashrath Manjhi, two real-life heroes, were mentioned.
Moving ahead we were shown a presentation on Design Thinking followed by discussion on the various slides, explaining-
· What is Design Thinking?
· After that we moved on to principles of Design Thinking.
Followed by, Design Innovation
· Design Process
· 5 steps in Stanford’s Design Thinking model.
We briefly discussed the business model of Whatsapp and how it was acquired by Meta in 2014 at 19 Billion Dollars valuation. Multiple practical real life examples were discussed along. Moving on to understand,
· Design Thinking Process
· Benefits of Design Thinking
· Summary
The last slide said,
“Designers [...] don’t try to search for a solution until they have determined the real problem, and even then, Instead of solving that problem, they stop to consider a wide range of potential solutions. Only then will they finally converge upon their proposal. This process is called Design Thinking”
-Don Norman
The workshop stimulated a lot of interesting ideas. We learned about several facets of how design thinking is changing firms in the modern era. We also discovered that diverse teams are better able to Pivot as situation changes. They tend to understand users at a deep level.