Design thinking enhancing ideas

When I saw this video published by a friend in YouTube I was stunned watching Jihong Yeom a Korean designer twisting the wired hanger and transforming it to what ever you can think of. But what more interesting here is not only his ability to transform the hangers to another object but also his ways of seeing or visualising what he will do and also plans everything in his head.
I would like to discuss here the latter part in the this blog and yes if you watch his series in the Youtube you might be thinking ‘This is easy, anyone can do this, all you need is a hanger and a plier’. Indeed it looks easy, but what you’re missing here just, which would happen when you actually try to do it yourself, is that you have not much ideas of what to do and how to do it.
This is the technic of design thinking that anyone should be learning, and be aware that the wired hanger is just a tool to make anything that you think of happen. What really interesting is the thinking behind the designer Jihong Yeom, his process of visualising the object in a short time and then making it happen. His skills is not an overnight skills. It takes practice, trying and finding error, rework, rebuilt, rethink of a better way to approach and so on. Isn’t this is the design process that most successful designers do in their everyday life?

wirehanger1

Yeom’s idea of designing the book holder was just to facilitates the way we can improve our life. to make life easier and to help each other. Not so much of to design something big, something awesome or something fantastic. Simple idea can grow, and that is what each of us should be focussing on.

Watch Jihong Yeom

Happiness Project For George Town, a Visual Communication Class Project

This is a project that I did with my Visual Communication class. The idea comes from Dr. Chris Kueh from Edith Cowan University in Perth who is also working on the similar plan for his design students. We thought that it would be interesting to have a similar project based on a different city. So Chris will work on city of Freemantle, Perth and I will work on George Town, Penang.

In my visual comm class the project runs for 14 weeks with 110 students from different areas of design and arts, a mix between Graphic Comm. Design students, New Media Design students, Product Design Students, and Fine Arts students. The brief was short, as the whole idea of the project is based on the design thinking and the ideas that the students will discovered through out the process. The brief of the project is to visualised this: What does Happiness means for George Town, as a city? The students were taken on a trip to George Town in 2 buses, accompany by myself, and three tutors. I have designed the path for the students to go through and gathered some information. The idea behind this is to get the students (1st, 2nd and 3rd year of degree program) to discover the problems and then think of a way to facilitates the problem through design. Each of the students have to start documenting their design journey through personal blog. Most of the students are not familiar with having their own personal blog, as they are used to the site of social media such as FB and Instagram to post their thoughts, so creating their own blog is a new discovery for them.

There are lots our theres but here are some links.

Nur Azreen Ng Seen Yen Blog Joan’s Blog Wong Shin Nin Blog Pong Ee Lin Blog Polly Lee Blog Nur Diyana Blog Chan Keat Tan Blog Amyhappyproject NgYunLai ChinPeiJun

Here is a video done by one of the student Ahnaf Hakimi.