To uncover the important building blocks of student supervision for lecturers.
To uncover the important building blocks of student supervision for lecturers.
Visual Design Thinking is using sketching and visualisation to get a better grasp on abstract matters. For example: a business strategy, a future vision or a specific challenge you have as a business owner or corporation. All designers know that sketching something forces you to make the intangible tangible and can transform ideas and thoughts into actionable realities. The result of the above is often a Rich Visual Representation, which is a large canvas that tells your story.
However, this visual representation is almost never the most valuable part of the Visual Design Thinking process. What is often most valued is the clarity that this process brings in the minds of all stakeholders. Something that seemed too large of a challenge before has now materialized by working with it visually. This brings the next step much closer: getting to work!
Here is a small scale example of such a process:
Student learning processes are something that many people have personally experienced. Some people dedicate their careers to education a new generation. It can be very fulfilling to help young people shape their future. One of the tasks of lecturers in higher education is supervision of student theses. How do you do this? What do you need to keep in mind? In this project, while talking and sketching, found out how this could be visually represented.
Rought sketching is the first step in almost any design process. It is almost impossible with complex matters to get to the final result at once. And even if that were possible, you would skip the most important steps: exploring, and gaining a better understanding of the topic.
In the next step, we searched for fitting metaphors to visualise the topic. All identified aspects and concepts from the previous steps have relationships to all others and these need to be investigated. The metaphor is this case is a bridge and an empty pool. The bridge is the project, the pool is the simulation of the workfield (visible in the distance as the sea).
The sketch is then built up in several iterations. In this case, the visual would also be used as a presentation tool. So we split it up into layers that could be presented separately and would, together, form the whole story.
Visual Design Thinking has been applied for centuries, but not often in a modern business setting. Even though every problem, challenge, strategy or business can use this process. The challenges of this time are big transitions and processes with large impacts at systemic level. Sketching is a common language of all human beings and can therefore bridge the gap between unclarity and clarity in a number of workshops and meetings in which a designer helps you visualise it.
Do you think this process can benefit you or your business? Feel free to contact us, and we can discuss it.