This is part of a series of blog posts in regards to the online class, Design Thinking Action Lab offered by Stanford University. Click here to check out the entire series.

The last week of the Design Thinking Action Lab is a wrap up. We were introduced to how design thinking is practiced in many different arenas, in education, large corporation, etc. The lecture has links to many new postings on the forum. Although I haven’t had time to check out all of them, here’s a video from one of the postings that brought a big smile to my face.

Continue reading “Design Thinking course finale” →

This is part of a series of blog posts in regards to the online class, Design Thinking Action Lab offered by Stanford University. Click here to check out the entire series.

Week 2’s assignment Empathy and Define was the first one that required peer review. There was a long list of criteria and rubrics. My submission didn’t score as well as I hoped but it’s not the score that mattered. It was the experience. Based on my review of other submissions, I discovered the phenomenon of students in India being forced to study engineering even when some of them don’t want to. The world can use a lot of engineers but I think happy engineers would do more good than the unwilling ones. In terms of my submission, I need to work harder on capturing everything from the interview of a stakeholder. My auditory learning mode has always been my weakest link.

Continue reading “Design Thinking course week 3-4” →

After finishing the Crash Course on Creativity last fall, I’ve been itching to take another MOOC. I tried taking another one on Coursera but didn’t finish it. The course involved many long videos and the professor was speaking 50 mph. I couldn’t grasp the concepts although I passed the big quiz by searching for answers from the video transcripts. That’s not the right way to learn. I’ve done that in the past when I had to pass a required class for school. The choice to learn is up to me now. It must be up to me how I want to learn.

Then I got an announcement about the Design Thinking Action Lab from the same host of the Creativity course. The instructor is a lecturer at the d.school of Stanford University. I heard about d.school a long time ago and I would have loved to go there for my undergrad but there is no way I would get into Stanford. Therefore, I can’t pass up the opportunity to take a d.school course for free even though my day job is the busiest in the summer months.

Continue reading “Design Thinking Action Lab” →