So finally the most heard about, the most anticipated course for Product Design was here. It welcomed us with mixed emotions-Should we be happy that finally we get to see the bigger picture of a system and understand it from a broad perspective or should we be sad that there is only 10 weeks left for us in this campus.. 10 weeks(thats just 2 and a half month) and we are not ready to go….Just not ready to say goodbye.
Anyway back to Systems.
The first day first class of Systems . Praveen(Our course Guide) took us through a small walk through a few previous projects done before, the Giga maps just to give us a gist of the kind and range of problems we can deal with.
Well, Interesting and tempting but still very unsure.What do we do again?
The first two weeks classes are with TAD ( Transportation and Automobile Design) and PD(Product Design) combined. It was good and refreshing to have new people and faces around for a change and I must bring it to the readers notice that even with an hours travel to and fro, the TAD guys had so much more energy and life!!!
The first activity -1.How are we feeling today ? 2. What are we expecting out of this course? A few games in the lawn to understand how Systems work and back to the classroom
<photo>
So then Praveen told us to think of bigger problems, ‘Wicked Problems’.. wicked problem?? Interesting word ‘wicked’, but whats a wicked problem?
WICKED PROBLEMS:
So what is a wicked problem? Is it like a villian in the story,Is it like an anti-hero? Should we be scared of it?
So, Wicked problem unlike what it might sound like arent wicked in their nature, just in wicked in ways it can be tackled. By definition a wicked problem is, “wicked problem is a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. The use of the term “wicked” here has come to denote resistance to resolution, rather than evil.”
So simply put in laymen terms,do you know something that has
1.Many layers of problem that are unknown,
2.No clear solution, unforseen outcomes,
3.No stopping point ,
4.High interdependence ?
Voila! you have found yourself an idle wicked problem.
Large volumes of newspapers, old magazines were pulled out to expand our thinking horizons, stalking news(maybe people too..;)), social platforms, talking to people (everywhere )and here is our data collections of problems we could qucikly pull out of our minds.
<photo>
<photo>
And after 15 minutes of starting at the board full of problems we narrowed down a few (4 votes each for problems excluding your own). These-
<photo>
A few days were spend debating and collecting brief data about each topic that excited us and we finally found peace (or was it disturbance?) with “Over consumerism” .
And so a team was formed (Juthika, Shibin and Tanya)and a broad mutually excited topic was agreed upon and shaken hands upon.
And thus we start.
Design Less; Design Right 