After working all week on ideas to improve campus life at Western University using the design thinking process, HBA1 students were ready to reveal what they’ve learned. Today’s portion of the Ivey Design Project showed how far they have come throughout the journey.
DAY FIVE
The faculty perspective – What did the students do today and why is it important?
The students wrote about the journey they undertook and the shifts in their thinking and ideas throughout the week. They also created a poster for the Project’s Poster Festival to show their peers and the faculty members how their problems and solutions evolved throughout the process.
“It was an opportunity to pull together all of the activities of the week. To reflect, in order to learn, and to share with one another to both reinforce their own experience and learn from others,” said Kanina Blanchard, Lecturer in Management Communications and General Management.
The student perspective – What did you do today and what was the key takeaway?
We created our posters and presented to the class. It gave us an opportunity to reflect on the whole design process. We went in with a broad overview on solving problems for Western University’s users, but, by the end of the week, our group narrowed down and focused on a financially burdened student named Natasha. Her problem was access to resources on campus, specifically academic counselling. Our solution was to make online counselling available to her. It also involved aggregating resources on campus so students can see all resources with one click, instead of having to search different websites.
“Reflecting back on the week, there were a lot of valuable subtle points that you just learn subconsciously – and that’s part of active learning.”
– Ezz Abdelmeguid
“Going through the entire process in one week without really having a lot of experience in design thinking is very cool because it shows what you can do if you have people in the room together thinking about the problems and how to approach them.”
– Priya Vaidyanathan
