One of the projects pursued this year at our DPS, Hyderabad school club was for the Design for Change challenge.

To facilitate the design thinking process of Feel – Imagine – Do – Share, we had a session with Viraat Aryabumi, a design enthusiast and techie from CBIT, Osmania University. Students and Moderators alike teamed up to explore prompts and rapidly prototype solutions to get the creative thinking process started.
Some pictures from the inspiring morning at Lamakaan, Hyderabad
This exercise gave all the participants a lot more clarity on how to define a problem and work towards a solution. The students finalised their Design for Change as this:
A school-wide forum was created as a solution. It is being used to share books, electronics, and other items amongst a known community.
This project was submitted as an entry for the 2015 Design for Change India challenge.
These were Viraat’s reflections from his role as a Project Mentor:
Design thinking isn’t a set of principles or codes that you strictly follow. It’s a way of living. Many people often mistake design to mean aesthetics. That’s incorrect. Design is functionality – “how it works”. Here “it” could be anything. That’s the beauty of design thinking. You can apply it to any part of your life (if you have an hour or two free, do check out the crash course at the Stanford Design school).