Doodad Design Activity

What is Design Thinking?

Design thinking is a creative process where we aim to understand the user and redefine problems to find clever solutions that might not be immediately obvious. Although design thinking was created by product designers, it’s also used by many in literature, art, engineering and business. Leading companies like Apple and Google use design thinking in their creative processes.

In a nutshell, design thinking is useful to anyone who wants to be a creative problem solver. As a student and maker, you’re in the business of problem solving so design thinking is also for you! This activity will give you some experience with using design thinking to creatively solve a problem.

Design thinking has five main stages. The first is to empathize with your users by conducting interviews and doing research to understand what challenges they face. Second, you will define your user’s needs as a question that you can answer with a new approach or product. The third step is to ideate by brainstorming many different solutions and challenging your assumptions about your problem. The next step is to prototype. In the prototyping stage, designers build rough representations of a range of their ideas. The final stage is to test your solutions by collecting user feedback to see what works and what doesn't. It’s important to note that these five stages aren’t always sequential. Often, it is best to repeat some of the stages in order to come up with the best solution. Sometimes it’s even necessary to start again from scratch!

Project Introduction

In this tutorial, you will create a solution to a physical problem in your home or makerspace by following the basic steps of the design thinking process (empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test). You will have a chance to look around the room and identify every-day problems that might need a solution. 

Over the course of this project, you will get exposure to prototyping with cardboard, using Computer Aided Design, and even some 3D printing and laser cutting!

• Paper and pen
• Cardboard
• Glue Gun or tape
• Scissors
• Exacto Knife
• CAD program
• 3D Printer or Laser Cutter (Optional)

Can you think of anything in your life that “bugs” you? Could you solve it with a physical product?

Take a few minutes to look around the room and find as many problems as you can that could be solved with a physical product — make sure to write them all down! Try to collect at least ten. 

Examine your list of problems and narrow it down to your favorite three. Some of my favorite and more fixable problems that I found around my own house were messy cables, pots of boiling water overflowing, and the mess melting ice cream makes. Make sure to factor in how complicated a problem is when you are considering it. Although it might be inspiring to pick a hard problem, like how to power your house, this can be unsatisfying (or impossible) to try to do in a reasonable amount of time.

I’ve illustrated my problems for you. Feel free to do so too!

Now it's time for the ideate phase of the design thinking process. Brainstorm as many solutions as possible to your three different problems and write them down — aim for a combined total of 30! Feel free to include quick sketches to illustrate your solutions. During this phase in the design thinking process, we want you to remember that brainstorming is all about quantity over quality. Often the best solutions are a result of generating a lot of bad ideas first, so don’t be afraid to jot down solutions that are silly or unrealistic! For example, one of the solutions to my messy melting ice cream problem was to find an ice cream that didn’t melt. Or for my pot boiling water problem, an alarm that alerts you if the water level in the pot is too high. We want you to be as creative as possible in the ideation phase, so that you ultimately end up with your most innovative and best solution! I’ve included a picture of one of my favorite silly solutions which was actually turned into a real product.

When you’re done brainstorming, look over your list of solutions. Pick the problem that has the most practical solutions and make more detailed illustrations for your three favorite ideas. I picked the tangled cords problem. Get creative and have fun with it!

If you’re in a classroom, now is a good time to present your sketches to the class. Talk about why you picked the problem, why you picked your three solutions, and mention your favorite silly ideas that you came up with.

Now it’s time to prototype one of your ideas. Use cardboard, hot glue, and whatever extra materials are available to you to create your prototype. Feel free to make different versions of the same solution. This prototype will not only help you test your solution, but will give you a better idea of how your product will work when you design it in the computer and build it for real. Prototyping helps you find flaws in your idea before you have to spend a lot of time designing a more detailed version.

I've included pictures of my prototype for the cord organizer. I made two versions. The first one used a rubber band to hold the charger, which I decided was too inconvenient. The second design, which I spent a little more time on, holds the charger in with a pocket. Making this prototype helped me a lot with the next step, where I had to visualize the final product in 3D to put the design into a computer.

Now that you have a complete prototype, we will introduce you to CAD (Computer Aided Design) to help further refine your doodad. CAD allows us to visualize our design in 3D, and then directly convert those models into real parts using laser cutting or 3D printing.

Here’s an example of my CAD design. Making the prototype really helped me figure out how I wanted to design my part in the computer and saved me a lot of time. I’ve been using CAD for years, so it’s okay if your model isn’t as complicated as mine.

There are multiple types of CAD programs. We use Fusion 360, an easily accessible but powerful professional design software offered by Autodesk. If you are a student or educator, you can download it for free on your computer with an education license. Otherwise, another great CAD option is Tinkercad or Onshape, which are both web based and can run on any computer.

CAD can be hard to learn at first, but there are plenty of beginner tutorials on YouTube! Here are a few of our favorites for Fusion 360:

Fusion 360 Tutorial for Absolute Beginners (2020)

Fusion 360 For Beginners

You can find lots of tutorials for other CAD software on YouTube. Pick whichever CAD program suits you best! Tinkercad is often the best option for beginners and allows you to make a design with easy to understand graphical tools.

While the learning process might be frustrating, CAD will be useful to you for the rest of your designing career. It will allow you to visualize ideas more clearly than you ever could on paper — and that is the first step to manufacturing custom parts!

Once you have your CAD program open, watched a few CAD tutorials, and familiarized yourself with the software, you can start designing your doodad! Unless you've had previous experience with CAD, I recommend that you only use the basic functions (like extrude and revolve) to make a rough model of your prototype. It's okay if your first model isn't perfect; expect to refine and redo them as you go.

Get help from an instructor or follow online tutorials for how to export your design to be 3D printed or laser cut. Both fabrication processes have their own limitations. With 3D printing, be mindful of design size, overhangs, and strength. With laser cutting you'll need to think about joining parts and material selection.

When you have your completed doodad in your hand, test it out! What works well? What doesn't? Expect to go back to CAD to edit your design. Feel free to even take an entirely new approach. If you are in a classroom, present your work to your classmates. Explain what your doodad does and make sure to show off your cardboard prototypes and any older 3D printed or laser cut versions that you made. Talk about your design process and what you liked and didn’t like about each version of the doodad that you made. Don’t worry if your doodad isn’t 100% functional when you’re presenting. Believe it or not, it can take even experienced designers days to make something as simple as a charging cord organizer. Congrats on finishing your first design activity!