We have finally finished our design thinking mod and have produced one final product from both groups each! It was a tiring process overall as we had to go through multiple prototyping iterations, constantly changing up what our final concept would be, and also working with the constraints of the project. We had to produce a book with the title “This book is a ___”, and had to fill in the blank by ourselves, which basically defined what our book was going to be about. We were tasked with using only the 3D printed filaments to create mini Printed Paper Actuators, as we had learnt beforehand. Marcus, Jia Wei, and my group’s book was called “This book is a Garden of Life”, which consisted of several flowers of varying colours with moving petals, signifying the life cycle of a water lily. Our “garden” was also home to fish and a tiny frog. Zhao Tong and Ivan’s book was titled “This book is an emotion”. It featured a cute dog in the middle of the book with moving ears and tongue, and the dog could produce different faces depending on the amount of heat given, thus showing different emotions.
After our projects were submitted, they held an exhibition for all the projects from DIP as well as the Design Thinking mods. The showcase was also filled with wonderful performances by ZheJiang students. The DIP projects were all innovative and interesting, and the mod was similar to how our own SUTD Introduction to Design mod is structured. However, the students were Year 3 design students, so naturally the projects were less focused on the engineering and programming aspects and more focused on the design aspect. Overall, the whole presentation gave us new insight to the kind of projects that China students focused on, which reflects on the problems that they typically deem as more important in their society.
