Igniting design thinking skills through simple exercises

When we say the word design, it creates an impression that design thinking is only for the artistically oriented. While traversing everyday life, we take many simple decisions - both consciously and subconsciously. Many of these decisions are open-ended and have multiple choices for us to pick from, so that we get an array of outcomes, making the design decisions. The thinking process that one goes through is called design thinking. City-based architect-designer Santhosh Shyamsundar says that we can improve the design thinking skills through a curated set of exercises and the youngster has come up with a workshop called 5 shots of raw design. To be held from August 15 to 19 at The Book office, Adyar, the workshop is for anyone who wants to develop their style of thinking. “One of the best ways to improve a person’s overall design thinking skill is to examine everyday tasks as design processes. I will be teaching various ways to stimulate design thought by using small exercises that are based on everyday life. It’s scientifically proven that this process increases self-awareness and change in a person’s perspective,” he says.

At this studio session-based workshop, participants will design various objects through small exercises. “Selected design exercises allow one to prioritise decisions while focusing on one decision at a time. These exercises show easily how they went about the process of designing. Mind-mapping exercises will help each person identify and theorise their thinking as they went about designing,” Santhosh says.

Explaining the concept behind design thinking, the youngster says, “Design thinking can be understood as the line of thought that a person goes through, to arrive at a combination of decisions when there are multiple factors and needs at stake. This sort of thought is already applied to simple everyday tasks, while one also consciously applies it to professional work. Developing design thinking skill is simply learning to holistically enrich one’s thought process by achieving clarity in the process of taking these design decisions, based on the amount of information that one has.”