MTC’s Design Thinking Programme

Steve Jobs once said,

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

Make The Change has always considered youths to be future change makers and as change makers, design thinking is an essential tool they should be equipped with.

Design thinking combines empathy, creativity and rationality to meet user needs and drive business success¹.

Through the course of 7 sessions with the girls from Tanjong Katong Girls School, they learnt how to:

• Emphatise: To develop a deep understanding of the problem

• Define: To articulate the problem they want to solve

• Ideate: To brainstorm and select potential solutions to work on

• Prototype: To design a prototype to test their solution

• Test: To test and refine their solution

The girls were split into 6 groups and tasked to come up with ideas to redesign their school library. Even though the workshop was conducted after their schooling timetable, they still remained proactive and enthusiastic when defining problem statements and ideating their solutions. We also brought them down to Enabling Village to gain inspiration and learn how to create a more inclusive environment in their library.

On the last session, we were pleasantly surprised by the girls’ hard work as they presented their research findings, user needs and thought processes. They have clearly identified the problems their schoolmates faced when using the library and came up with innovative solutions to tackle them. They even showcased their well made prototypes to earn some brownie points from the judges.

We wrapped up the workshop by announcing the winning team. As all of the groups displayed great team spirit and generated wonderful ideas, the points between one another were tight. With that, as cheesy as it sounds, every one of them is a winner in our hearts.

We believe that the workshop has been a fun and enriching one for the girls at Tanjong Katong Girls School and we look forward to seeing their ideas being implemented in their library!

¹http://www.michaelbartl.com/article/human-centered-design/