The 2nd Cohort of the UPSHIFT Social Innovation Training had their second session for Week 3 on 18th August 2021, with the trainer, Miss Oreo asking the students to give examples of creative ideas or solutions that they have seen. She also asked them to give examples of instances where they have been creative. Miss Oreo then asked the students if anyone can be creative for which the majority of students answered “Yes”. The students played a game where each group picked two words from a list, tried to be creative about them, and presented an idea.
After the game, Miss Oreo took the students through the Design Thinking Process; Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. She spoke about idea design using “The Idea Design Guide”, which asks the questions: who is the idea for, what is the idea, how will the idea work, who are the people that will come together to make the idea work, what will the users benefit from the idea? They watched a video about someone’s innovative idea and had a discussion about what they thought of the video. In reference to the video,
Miss Oreo encouraged each group to think and start small with their ideas because small goes a long way. She then introduced “User experience” which helps understand how, when, and where the user and the different stakeholders interact with an idea in the course of a typical day or over a period of time. She talked about what a prototype is and why building a prototype is important in the design thinking process. She also explained to the students the different styles of prototyping. Before the class ended, they were given a few minutes to discuss in groups their research topics while Miss Oreo went around to monitor their progress.
