This week the EPICS class did an activity to introduce students to Design thinking.

The activity was developed by Standford’s d-school and is referred to at the Wallet Project.  In this activity, students paired off and design a wallet for their partners.  Students through the contents of each other’s wallets, and designed a wallet to meet the needs of their partner.   This enables a sense of empathy, learn how to interview, understand users needs, and the importance of prototyping.  The students had different needs – some liked to have everything on themselves, while others wanted a more simplistic system.

When we did this in class, many of the students were apprehensive about the activity at first.  This was not like most of their engineering courses but during the reflection period, the students were able to recognize how key lessons were important to their projects. When the instructor asked “how is this related to your EPICS project,” there was a clear “ah-ah” moment in the class.

Key lessons included: listening to users (their ideas will be different than yours), engaging stakeholders through the design process, and have iterative designs.

Overall, this activity was a success, and we will be doing it next year.