Personal Creativity Reflection

Design Thinking
For the first three weeks of March, the Academy for Entrepreneurship
and Innovation came to our class to do an exercise in design thinking. I
had read about the design thinking process in David Kellys book,
Creative Confidence, but it was a completely different experience to
actually go through the entire process with an idea that our group had
created. Our task for the next three weeks was to design a solution for
University of Maryland students to become less stressed. With that simple mission, we had begun a
weeklong adventure to develop our app, RemindMe an app that syncs to the Enterprise Learning
Management System, or ELMS, to remind students when their assignments are due well in advance of
their due date. By pushing them not to push off their homework and quizzes by constant text message
and notification reminders, students would not procrastinate as much, and would not be as stressed.
The first step to design thinking is to empathize with your end user. We watched a video of an IDEO
team going through the process to learn how to do this. The IDEO team went straight to the customers
and brought them into the
design process. They did this
through conducting interviews
to construct a point of view for
the end user. They were very
mindful of the questions that
they asked, and kept it casual;
its not a survey, its a conversation. They used a technique called anchoring, where they asked the
interviewee about a specific moment; its much easier to get your interviewee to open up if you ask
them about a specific moment or detail. The questions were open ended, and ensured that the
information was accurate by restating the critical information that was received from the end user.
Asking these questions allowed for a breadth of ideas that would late aid in the problem solving. The
most useful step of this for me was the workshop on how to interview people. I believe that I can
empathize with the end user, however asking the right kinds of questions, and completing the

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interview in an ethical manner were techniques that I simply hadnt thought about before, so this
section was very helpful to me. When I interviewed a few friends for the process, it was interesting to
User

Need

Insight

Verbs, not

Not too broad

Grounds

nouns

(overwhelming itself in
solution) or too Empathy
narrow
(youve
already solved
your problem)

really sit and listen attentively to what they were

saying. I talked to a couple of different people, and
they had different perspectives on how to stress less.
I asked an engineer, an architecture major, a
journalism major, and a cell biology and genetics
major, so I had a diverse range of opinions that
varied wildly, except for one common fact every
single one of the interviewees procrastinated, and
that led to their stress. However, they all had

different strategies for dealing with stress, so though I had narrowed down the problem, I still did not
have a solution.
Once the questions had been gathered, it was time to define our problem. This is the key step in design
thinking that leads it to be such an innovative process. The interview had given us our end use and our
need we need a way for University of Maryland Undergraduate students to stress less. However, we
still needed the insight that would help us to develop our problem.
Defining our problem would also allow us to focus on the users point of view,
and to do this we used a ladder technique. We took a few key points gathered
during our interviews, and broke them down, asking why at every point.
Continuing this process, we finally ended up with the answer to our Why do
students procrastinate? problem. Ultimately, they dont have the self-control to
sit down and do work that they dont want to do. Now that we had defined our problem, it was time to
figure out how to solve that problem! Like I mentioned in my introduction, I have a commitment to
lifelong learning, and I am always asking why. Seeing how to actually make use of that information in
why ladders was a particularly useful skill to me. I will definitely be using why ladders in the future
not only for design thinking purposes, but as a study guide for my exams!

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Personal Creativity Reflection

Ideation was probably my favorite part of the exercise.
Ideation is similar to brain storming in that it is a session
of rapid idea generation, but ideation is not structured
the way that brainstorming is constrained.
Brainstorming has a very structured feel to it, and it
forces participation and shuts down ideas that arent
feasible. Ideation encourages any and all ideas; creative,
ridiculous, impossible, and the tame. To help open our minds to the world of
ideation, we all planned a game called Yes, and, which was a stoking
activity. The point was to encourage us to open our minds. The longer the
game went on, the wilder and crazier our stories became! Then, we all grabbed
post-its and got to work on our ideation session. We built off of one anothers
ideas, gave feedback, wrote ideas down, and differed judgment. Our goal was to generate as many
ideas as possible, rather than one good idea. There was no hierarchy of being shot down, and because
we were writing down everything in sticky notes, we could form a sort of web of ideas that were
sparked off of someone elses sticky note. We did three rounds with constraints and leases to help
broaden our minds to different possibilities.

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Personal Creativity Reflection

After the rapid generation of solutions, it is time to select an idea to work with. The ideas were selected
specifically for potential, not for feasibility, thereby assuring we did not get the same result we would
have from brainstorming. Continuing to develop the solution, and iterating the selection process would
allow for selection of the best possible solutions, not the ones that were simple to do. Ideation was
particularly helpful to me because I have a tendency to shoot down ideas that arent immediately
feasible, but I need to learn to open my mind because maybe someone else will find a way to
accomplish what I think is impossible.
While ideation was probably the funniest,
prototyping was by far the most useful and
exciting step. Once we had narrowed down
the idea and solution, we were able to create
our prototype something that our end users
were actually able to interact with. It was
slightly crudely made, only drawings on a

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whiteboard, but we were actually able to create an interactive surface on a phone that behaved like a
real app!

Check it out at ter.ps/remindme

To be able to click different places on the screen and actually have it move
was so incredible, it gave you a real feeling of how the app would eventually
look and feel. We also had a diverse group of people with a range of ideas
about how to design the app, but we felt that it was pretty intuitive. When we
presented in front of the class, we were the only ones with a real, working
prototype to show, and it was apparent that many people were much more
interested in our idea solely because they could actually touch and see it.
This became much more important as we moved onto the final stage of our
design thinking program test. We actually had the app created, so we could
gauge users reactions while using it. We asked for feedback, suggestions, and
reactions, but, most importantly, we took the app back to the people that we
had originally interviewed. We thanked them again for interviewing with us,
and asked them to look at the app, interact with it, and asked if this would help
them to control their stress levels. One user feedback that we had gotten from a
similar app that blew up her phone with notifications, was that she had
eventually started even procrastinating putting in assignments! Our app had
fixed that problem by automatically syncing with Enterprise Learning Management System (ELMS).
Assignments submitted on ELMS automatically close at times that the professors designate, so ELMS
would have the due dates for all assignments already. Additionally, if a student wanted to add
assignments that are not for school, such as job applications or even a reminder to call home every
week, the student would be able to do so. This app received such great praise from everyone who
tested it out, one of the people in my team and I have even discussed fleshing out this project into a real
app available on the App Store. I was so excited to show everyone I knew this app, and it was such a
success due to design thinking. Now that I am in the QUEST honors program, I know that I will
definitely be using this technique in the coming years to help me with my projects.

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Personal Creativity Reflection

Creative Confidence
Creative Confidence has had perhaps the most profound effect on me more than any other book we
have read this semester. Two of the biggest obstacles I face are my lack of self-confidence and my
tendency to procrastinate. Creative confidence has helped me start to tackle both of those weaknesses
this semester.
Firstly, Creative Confidence has helped me to just do it. Being confident in my abilities is not always
easy, but this semester I took a big leap. My honors college, Digital Cultures and Creativity, requires
four specific classes for the program, culminating in the last semester with the capstone course. My
Digital Cultures and Creativity capstone2, the DCC ETC, integrates the concepts I have explored in my
time in Digital Cultures and Creativity, both in class and the workshops held outside of class. DCC ETC
is a data visualization project that attempts to change meaningless information as a thing and turn it
into something much more impactful. Many introductory biology students are often baffled by,
arguably, the most vital, yet abstruse function in living systems cellular respiration. My capstone will
attempt to convey how one of the parts of cellular respiration, the electron transport chain, operates
through an interactive model of the system. DCC ETC will utilize 3D printing and an Arduino to
ensure that my model is more accurate, engaging, and interactive than other models that Ive come
across in my career as a biology student.
While this project may sound interesting to an onlooker, it becomes far more complicated by the fact
that I have very little experience with CAD or Arduino. In a semester where I am absolutely swamped
with schoolwork, I have had to teach myself how to 3D model and how to code and integrate a
microcontroller with all of the components necessary to set up a model for a very complex process. The
old me would have given up and picked an easier project, but the person who read the book Creative
Confidence was able to convince herself that she would be able to complete the project, and I stuck with
it.
I expand upon this idea in my conclusion, but I have never been very creative when it comes to artistic
talents, however, when I was forced out of my comfort zone into making a cooler last year, I became

2

There is more information regarding my capstone presentation in the conclusion section.

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more confident in my abilities and I now enjoy making art, though Im still not that good at it. I have
continued to make art, with my confidence boosted, and Im very pleased with the result!
Creative Confidence has also allowed me to stop procrastinating as much as I used to. The action
catalysts listed in the Leap chapter have helped me on numerous occasions, including this PCR and
when we worked on our design thinking app challenge.

Get Help.
Create Peer Pressure
Gather an Audience
Do a Bad Job
Lower the Stakes
These five steps will help me in my academic career as well as my professional future, and this book
has certainly helped me to improve myself for the better.

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Personal Creativity Reflection

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