The Reverse Design Thinking

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The Design Thinking process is an astonishing way to observe how a product comes to live. In our previous classes we used to review the problem first, before proceeding to find a solution for it.  But how to know which problem an innovative product is solving? To approach this, a good method is to apply reverse Design Thinking.

Reverse Design Thinking is a technique to go back from a solution/product to the problem that originally lead to the final product.

In November 2019, my colleagues and myself from the InnoX team visited the Design Museum in London to get to know innovative products and services. During this visit, we viewed an exhibition called “Beazley Designs of the Year 2019”, presenting the best ideas and solutions in fashion, architecture, digital products and graphic design.

I have point out that I am an admirer of London’s manifold offer of museums, so the prospect of visiting the Design Museum had me quite excited and I was not disappointed, the Design Museum had a vast variety of  innovative ideas featured. Among them, I found the following products or services especially interesting.

A Website That Generates Fake Portraits

The designer Phil Wang developed a website that generates fake portraits by combining different features of a real person to create a new human face variation, not likely to  exist in reality. An exciting outlook on the future possibilities in media and entertainment, which nevertheless made me think of the threat of online scams and the general abuse of this technology.

A plastic made of plants

The Crafting plastics! studio designs and manufactures plastic for useable items of the daily life by using the Nonoilen Technology. This technology offers an alternative way of recycling plastic to make usable products, while saving the environment.

As assignment of our Design Thinking course, we had to choose three products to present to the class. As a group we focused on human centric innovations and health related solutions.

1. Lia Pregnancy Test:

The Lia Pregnancy Test is the first pregnancy test in 30 years made of biodegradable materials, redesigned to be discreet and sustainable. It breaks down when flushed down the toilet, and completely biodegrades into soil, unlike current pregnancy tests which are neither biodegradable nor recyclable.

Looking into this product there are two intentions behind this innovation obvious: how pregnancy tests can be made environmentally friendly and how to completely redesign a  traditional product.

2. e-NABLE Raptor Reloaded:

Richard Van As and Ivan Owen teamed up to design a prosthetic hand for growing children. Including the online community they formed e-NABLE. Since 2011, the community is working together designing customized products using a low-cost 3D printer. They use several methods to optimize the product. Besides engaging the online community, they also enable users to create their own prosthetic hand, supporting with the right measurements.

If we go back to reverse Design Thinking, the elements that the founders wanted to resolve was using available resources to produce low cost prosthetic hands and making the prosthetics available everywhere.

By outsourcing it to online communities, so anyone could contribute, made it user-friendly and brought expertise from all over the world.

3. Elvie Pump:

Elvie is a London-based startup that focuses on smart technology for woman. Elvie Pump is a portable breast pumping device, that doesn’t require a change of dress to use it, while working almost completely silent. By connecting it with a mobile application, users can see the volumes and device use history.

Applying reverse Design Thinking, the Startup wanted to redesign the existing product to become user-friendly in public places, reduce the noise-level and make it easy to carry around. Elvie successfully redesigned a light, silent when operating and user-friendly breast pump.

Besides the above, so many other remarkable innovations were presented, showing how innovators come up with smart solutions to problems.

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The museum visit was mind opening in terms of innovations and how traditional solutions can be reintroduced by redesigning and community engagement to offer new solutions to problems.

Innovation never means the must of a completely new product/solution; it also can be rethinking existing solutions to make them better and more user-friendly. 

Startup Weekend Experience: A Hackathon with Surrey County Council

I had expected a lot to happen upon me starting my Kingston University journey, but honestly, I didn’t expect the Startup Weekend Experience event on the topic of design thinking. Now, design thinking is a module that teaches tools and techniques to design and develop a business from scratch. Having made already some experience in that field, and having already learned quite some tools on design thinking, I was doubting I would learn much new.

I was wrong.

Hackathons are usually held for 2 days – with bringing computer programmers together in a team to come up with a new application or web solution.

Business Hackathons on the other hand bring different background professionals/ students to come up with ideas and try the prototype to solve a social problem.

Here’s what happened:

Day One.

Knowing Your Surroundings:

The session started with getting to know some initiatives that are currently implemented in Surrey, UK and we also learned about Surrey Council initiatives for local communities. This was the first time I heard about local initiatives, which support the socio-culture of Surrey. 

Team:

For any hackathon, choosing your team member is important. As much as knowing their strengths and weaknesses, so everyone can contribute to the fullest. But in this hackathon, our team was selected randomly, and I was kind of worried because I didn’t know anything about any of them, nor how they would act as a team member. Fun fact was, that by chance all of the eight people on my team were international students. And after the first task I understood that different backgrounds are a real benefit for design thinking and very fun to work with.

Persona:

Creating a persona requires interviews. As instructed, we were going on the streets and interviewed random people if they are interested in social work. If the answer was “yes” then we were asking the “why”. If the answer was “no” then we inquired why” they think that they were not interested and getting deeper into their stories. The idea of persona is to get an idea of your customer, what their needs are and how they see the problem.

We interviewed around 16 people and our team discussed about the interviews and created a persona and defined the need. In our persona we focused on single mothers who do not get enough time for their children or themselves. This is where we used empathy to imagine ourselves in our persona’s shoes.

Persona

Ideation:  

I personally like ideation, because this is where you can see how your teammates think, and use crazy mindsets to get really interesting ideas. In ideation sessions, the trick is to keep on writing ideas, no matter how strange they seem. Our team had generated 20 ideas until we ran out of time.

With ideation busy day one came to an end.

Idea session

Day Two.

Choosing the best idea and create a win – win situation:

We started the day with selecting the best two ideas from our 20 ideas. In the end we decided on the idea “Rent a Student”, a platform that connects single parents and university students. University Students would be offered a place to stay for free in the single parent’s house in exchange of some household services like babysitting, helping with household chores, tutoring the children and others.

Prototype:

We created a sign stand for our solution by drawing the website and features of the website. Then we shared the idea with our mentors and instructors for insights on the idea.

Feedback:

This was the fun part of the session. We needed to choose one person from the team who would have to go from table to table of the other team to pitch and get feedback on the respective ideas. Our team choose me and I went to three tables to get ideas on how we could solve any arising problems. This helped us to re-structure our solution and come up with solutions for possible questions.

Finally Pitching:

Last part of the hackathon is pitching and our team wanted to create an act to present our idea. So one of us played a single parent with a child, one was the narrator and another person acted as a student.

Hearing the other pitches also gave us inspiration and ideas how we could do better and it was amazing to see everyone’s team effort and ideas.

The “Rent a Student” Team

Result:

I humbly but happily can state, that our team was awarded as the most technological solution for community engagement – and we got candy as a prize on top!

Summarizing, it was a great learning point for me to get ready for my master’s program and to realize that I have chosen the right course for myself.

A Knowledge Journey Begins…

My name is Rahat Hossain, and I have just started doing my Masters in Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Kingston University. The last seven years I have devoted my career to social business and have co-founded social enterprises in Bangladesh. Professionally, I am specialized in technological solutions, product/service development and operations. Having an Honors degree in Accounting and a MBA in finance has given me a good perspective on business operations.

I love traveling. My work in Bangladesh has given me the opportunity to visit countries like the USA, the UK, South Africa, India, Singapore, Austria, Germany, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, Nepal, and Thailand. Traveling not only has helped me to grow personally, it helped me to enhance my experience. Meeting people from different countries and cultures was truly an eye opener for me. Getting to know fellow entrepreneurs and change makers, and learning their struggles and stories, has always amazed and inspired me.

It was in 2016, when I truly realized that knowledge and gaining new skills are tremendously important for an entrepreneur to move forward and, I am convinced, it is a key to success in life. From then on, I considered myself a learner and an observer. I made it a priority to participate in many training programs and workshops, also exploring learning platforms like the US State Department Fellowship, Accelerators program, etc.

Private Audience with Her Majesty The Queen Elizabeth II, June 2017

2017 was an amazing year for me. I was selected for the Queen’s Young Leaders Award 2017, which was given to only 280 young leaders from the Commonwealth Countries. The award winners were selected for their leadership and the social impact they create in their own country. Not only this award offered the outstanding opportunity to meet all those great young leaders, it also meant receiving the award by HM The Queen Elizabeth II herself. I feel particularly honored to have been granted a call for a private audience with HM The Queen Elizabeth II. Furthermore, this award gave me the opportunity to attend an especially designed program for the awardees at the University of Cambridge. This program was one of a kind learning experience for me and I got to know the power of collaboration and realized a new meaning of leadership.

Since then, my leadership definition has become:

“A leader is who walks a path before anyone else and by showing others where he stepped, leading them to their success and build more leaders on their way to make society greater.”

– Rahat Hossain

During My Support Team Role for QYL 2018

Realizing my growing wish to extend my skills and mindset, in 2018 I decided to pursue a Masters degree abroad. I knew it was the right time for me, and I wanted to increase my horizon, and learn from a new environment. The UK was one of my favorite choices for studying because of the startup culture and creativity.

I set and reached my goal in being granted the Chevening Scholarship and being accepted in the Kingston University in 2019, starting a yearlong journey to quench my thirst to learn and gather new experiences.  I want to use this opportunity to pursue my three future goals of being a serial entrepreneur, starting a business consultancy and finally teaching at Bangladeshi University.

Bangladeshi Chevening Scholars 2019-2020

For me, this blog is not only a part of my design-thinking pathway, but it actually always has been a goal of mine to have my own blog. This blog will serve as a reminder of all the things I have learned this year in the UK, and I will be able to come back here to refresh and reflect my learnings. On top of that, I hope that this blog will also create a learning space for my fellow classmates, colleagues and my readers.

Please visit my LinkedIn profile if you would like to know more about my professional career.