Last week, we taught a 2 hour design-bootcamp to Stanford undergraduates. We had 2 hours to get through an entire design cycle: from user research, to forming an idea, to prototyping it, and finally testing & iterating it. We chose a common topic to be the challenge for the first project: how to redesign waking up in the morning.
It was a good exercise for us to refine our Design teaching — and it was wonderful to see the participants get from an inkling of an idea to a physical product or experience, that they could test, refine, and brand. The undergraduates brought tremendous energy — they weren’t afraid to make paper iphone apps, interactive wall interfaces, construction-paper robots, and wearable wake-up devices out of paper napkins. That willingness to play while building out an idea is fundamental — we build products (even at low-fidelity) so that we can test our idea in better ways, and then learn whether we should pursue that design & how to iterate on it to make it better.
The participants went from talking, to writing, to sketching, to building, to testing — it was a great evening, full of energy & new ideas!
