Human Centered Design workshop by Smart Design

Couple of weeks ago our master students had the awesome opportunity to closely work with Ivan Exposito and Jamie Nicholson from Smart Design, Barcelona. A one week long workshop focused on Human Centered Design.

image 1: students during the workshop.

A great challenge were students put user centered design tools into practice, had the opportunity to understand what´s it like to work in a design consultancy such as Smart Design and were pushed into fast decision making. The workshop was designed in a way that students would work in a `professional` like environment. Take a glance at the planning of the week:

MONDAY: Students got the design brief via video conference by Ivan Exposito. Soon after, students started planning the user research in teams. Each team got one of the following design briefs:

Design brief A: To improve the user experience of buying a snack from a vending machine in Bilbao.

Design brief B:  To improve the user experiences of buying a ticket from a metro ticket machine in Bilbao.

TUESDAY & WEDNESDAY: Students spent both days doing fieldwork in Bilbao. They spent 48 hours in the city, where they did observation and had guerrilla interviews with target users.

imagen2: students doing research.

THURSDAY: Time to synthesize all the data collected during the previous days. Students used templates that are used by Smart Design to visualize the main learning’s and insights.

image 3: Template that summarizes the insights.

FRIDAY: Workshop day. Students spent time in doing experience maps, articulating insights and identifying opportunities, brainstorming, …  And finally story boards and rapid prototyping were used as a tool to communicate their proposed new experiences. Ivan Exposito and Jamie Nicholson played the role of the client, and after the presentations, both gave students valuable feedback on their final design and the followed process.

image 4: Experience mapping.

image 5: Opportunity identification.

Overall, it had been a great experience, where students got the opportunity to work in a “professional” way, having a “client” and being pushed to work under time pressure. Jamie and Ivan’s points of view happened to be very interesting and relevant to envision what students future job could look like.

Thank you Jamie and Ivan for your collaboration!

//Alazne