After spending the semester talking about the entire design thinking process it was time to put our knowledge to work. Creating an app was a good trial run but now it was time to create a design for good design to help people our school campus. For our topic, my partner and I decided to choose cyberbullying. Bullying has always been an ongoing issue and schools have taken precautions to stop it, but cyberbullying has become a new threat to kids who are getting phones at an earlier age and going on the internet and social media. Again the first step for the design thinking process is to not only research but also empathize. Empathize is the research necessary for a person to conduct so that they know what they’re going to make and for who their “target audience” is and how to make it fit correctly into the designated environment. Empathy also gives a researcher a chance to see how other people feel and are impacted by certain things.
Our focus for this project was cyberbullying in college. After researching multiple articles and stories, we discovered that people are unaware bullying can exist past K-12 grades and still occur in college. And on top of that bullying only adds more stress to students already under a ton of stress from a change in lifestyle and school work. One of the biggest takeaways for me from this stage was learning that one of the biggest factors of cyberbullying is that it can happen to anyone in the safety of their own house, not just at school. Academic performances can take a toll as a result of cyberbullying and because it is not a face to face interaction, the content sent may be harsher on people because they are not there to see how it affects a person emotionally and there is no sense of humanism or empathy. Going into this process we knew cyberbullying was a pressing issue, but learning about how it has affected people personally has driven us to really want to help as much as possible and create something to help make more people become aware.
