Week 2 – Design Thinking

According to “Design Thinking”, design in the business field is always about customer services and how to draw customers’ attention to my product. As the article pointed out, and also, in my opinion, design is a way to create a new product including a new program, a new product for people’s quality of life, or other things that can make life easier, or is a way to improve certain products to make them more unique with better quality that they can be more user friendly or make more profits out from them compare to their competitors.

For example, people in old days usually cut garlic or similar cooking materials manually with knives, but after people thought of and designed garlic cutters, cutting these kinds of cooking materials became much easier and faster. The tool made the experience of cooking much more enjoyable since people only need to pull the tool then there are the materials ready for them to cook. 

Mcdonald's used to be a family restaurant in a small town run by two brothers, but a businessman was able to find the opportunity to expand the influence of the brand and designed the whole store to make it more related to the feature of “fast food” which is fast, cheap and convenient, and eventually, he bought the brand from the brothers and made Mcdonald's becomes one of the most popular fast food restaurants in the world. 

According to the article, although people always believe that grade ideas pop fully formed out of brilliant minds, but everything has “if”. Sometimes, the right idea comes out from at the right moment which doesn’t require a high IQ, it’s more dependent on the inspiration that people found from the objects around them. There are no garlic cutters hundreds of years ago, Mcdonald's was only a small family restaurant that people barely know about. They became a part of our life is because someone designed them differently, caught the inspiration from their daily life, and made their thoughts true.

Week 1 - About Me

Hello!

My name is Yuchen Lin, you can also call me Harry as my English name, I’m an international student from China and I’m currently a Junior at UWM. My major is Computer Science and I’m working on Campas at this moment. I also help my family members with their own eCommerce business which is being an Amazon seller.

The reason for taking this course is this course is a part of my requirement to be able to graduate. But on the other hand, I chose this course is also because I think learning about design will be helpful for my future career. I want to be a game programmer, it is my responsibility to catch players’ attention and let them be willing to play the game I created. Therefore, the knowledge of designing became more important. While I was helping my family member out, we also need to figure out what kind of products can bring us substantial profit, sometimes, there are sellers who are already selling the products we want to try out so we have to make some differences to be able to make our products stand out more. From time to time, I figured that it was very hard for me to jump out of the box and think differently to make our products better due to my lack of knowledge of designing. When I first started to work with my family member, we found out that people are selling Whisky ice balls that were stored in a fancy little box and they were selling a good amount every day especially during Christmas, etc. So we figured that we can probably make some changes to the product and try to join the market. I advised that changing the color of the little box may be helpful, but after discussing with my family member, he pointed out that the shape of the ice ball can also be changed, or even put more items in the box to make it more valuable to the customers. I could see the differences between me and my family member, he has more experience and knowledge of designing to fit in the markets better with any products. In my opinion, design can be equally important in any field, not only Arts.

I’m very excited about this course, I hope that we can have a great semester together!

Thank you,

Yuchen Lin