Tsinghua Daimler Design Thinking Workshop
On March 3rd, the Tsinghua Daimler Design Thinking Workshop, jointly organized by the Service Design Research Institute of the School of Fine Arts at Tsinghua University and the IT Retail Department of Daimler, was held as scheduled. This workshop is based on the Design InnoHub platform of Tsinghua University. Based on Tsinghua University's exploration and practice in interdisciplinary innovation in design, technology, and business, a design thinking toolkit has been specially customized for enterprise innovation and work mode optimization, guiding participants to transform their ideas and insights into actionable strategies and designs.
At the beginning of the event, Professor Fu Zhiyong, the director of the Service Design Research Institute at the School of Fine Arts of Tsinghua University, shared the development process and practice of design innovation at Tsinghua University with the workshop participants, giving them a basic understanding of design driven innovation. Subsequently, under the leadership and guidance of researcher Ji Yu from the research institute, employees from Daimler China's IT retail, human resources, and sales departments, as well as graduate students from Tsinghua University, formed five teams. The one-day workshop officially began. In the workshop, participants conducted user interviews, pain point definitions, needs mining, and opportunity assessments around the theme of "How to make work happier", and ultimately proposed innovative solutions and low fidelity prototypes for each group.
WorkTogether Design Team
Based on on-site user interviews, this group constructed a user profile represented by "after-sales". By collecting detailed information on language, behavior, thinking, and feelings in the user model, it was found that there are some serious problems in communication between after-sales and IT departments. By conducting a detailed analysis of different stages in the software development process, starting from establishing requirements, feasibility analysis, project initiation, and stages such as development, testing, submission, feedback, improvement, and delivery, a user journey diagram was drawn. The touchpoints, behaviors, emotions of characters, and reasons for each stage were analyzed in detail. Finally, taking into account some issues that arise during daily communication between the after-sales department and the IT department, such as untimely communication, unclear requirements, and project initiation not targeting target users, several design opportunities were proposed, including "open office space", "rapid iterative prototype communication", and "popularization of basic knowledge between different positions". A prototype design sketch of the workshop was also drawn. I hope to create a business oriented open office space and achieve continuous clarification of requirements and product improvement through rapid iteration of prototypes, thereby improving work efficiency and eliminating generation gaps.
Entertainment and Fitness Design Team
The members combined the theme of innovative work modes and utilized tools from typical users to construct user profiles represented by "IT programmers". Through discussion and brainstorming, analyze the information of real users, and then conduct user behavior analysis based on their different work stages. Conduct user needs analysis and emotional experience analysis from their commuting to work, various meetings, communication, coding, overtime, and other stages. Collaborate in groups to draw a user journey map. The group members focused on the theme of "entertainment and fitness" for the upper class, and discovered the pain points of fitness problems under the busy work of IT professionals. They designed and constructed an intelligent office fitness service system, and sorted their ideas through innovative coordinate methods to identify priorities. Finally, the group took "adjustable smart seats", "regional fitness equipment", and "health schedule app" as feasible and valuable ideas as design opportunities, and ultimately implemented the prototype design in an interface manner.
Intelligent Parking Lot Design Team
Unlike other teams that have innovatively designed pain points in their work, this group selected a young mother as the user through user profiling and analyzed her commuting process and pain points. They hope to reduce employee anxiety and improve their happiness and comfort at work by creating a buffer zone - the parking lot - before and after work. After exploring the pain points in the user journey map, the team found that after the user left for work, a series of traffic "shocks" followed, causing employees to arrive at the workplace feeling restless and overwhelmed. Therefore, there is an urgent need for a public parking lot that can save time, effort, and effort to solve problems such as finding parking spaces, traffic congestion, delayed work, and affecting normal working hours. Through the practice of various design thinking tools, the prototype is ultimately presented using LEGO blocks, achieving the goal of being able to commute on time, personally pick up and drop off children, and minimizing morning and evening rush hours.
Huan Yan Ji Design Team
When discussing character portraits initially, the group focused on the lack of a sense of future. Due to the fact that the group was almost entirely female, the mind map was biased towards the female group. After empathetic thinking, it was found that there is a lack of communication channels for women to deal with a lack of sense of future. How to make the female group open up psychologically and have a rational understanding of their career plans becomes particularly important. After discussion, group members decided to create a public space within the company, through which female employees can find their future career positioning. In this space, the music bar, mini gym, online education area, stage display area, and psychological counseling room are integrated. In this integrated space, female employees can freely discuss future development, learn new knowledge, elevate the overall image and psychological content to a dimension, and rejuvenate their youthful appearance.
Open Meeting Room Design Team
Our group has identified "meetings" as our focus through the initial user profile. During the user's journey, the meeting process was divided into three stages: pre meeting, mid meeting, and post meeting, and touchpoints, goals, and actions were analyzed to determine pain points and design directions. During the process, the group discovered multiple pain points related to the meeting, including the difficulty in finding a fixed meeting location, the monotonous and dull meeting environment, and the need to frequently report to the boss after the meeting summary. The final group proposed a semi open space design plan to address the difficulty in finding conference rooms. Design a semi open shared meeting space on a certain floor. At the same time, yoga mats are equipped in a semi open space, with a relaxed decoration environment and open space design to help conference members discuss work topics more efficiently and achieve task goals. The prototype was built using LEGO and a large meeting summary board was added to the conference room prototype to record meeting previews and discussions, for sharing information with superiors and colleagues.
By using design thinking tools, the five teams have developed their own unique perspectives on the topics of work stress reduction and office model innovation, contributing their efforts to solving pain points and difficulties that are prone to occur in work scenarios. At the end of the event, Teacher Fu Zhiyong highly praised the excellent divergent thinking ability of the participants, and gave feedback on the achievements of each group from aspects such as design creativity, logical thinking, application feasibility, and future business opportunities.
In a compact and enriching design thinking workshop, participants from different departments and backgrounds shared their daily work experiences with each other, bringing departments closer together. Through divergent, convergent, and evaluative thinking from multiple perspectives, each group has completed their own design proposal. Daimler IT department head Liu Ruonan affirmed the results of this workshop and hopes to continue cooperation in the future to increase the vitality and market competitiveness of her own enterprise, while setting an example for the innovation of work models in other enterprises. Let's look forward to further collaboration between Tsinghua and Daimler teams, turning creativity into reality and continuously exploring and enhancing the power of internal innovation within the company.