Substantive Contribution #2

Design Process

The design process is more than a checklist of steps — it is a mindset that emphasizes exploration, iteration, and reflection. As outlined in this week’s reading, an effective design process moves through the phases of Understand, Plan, Try, and Reflect, allowing designers to shift between divergent thinking and convergent thinking. What makes it powerful is its non-linear nature: each phase can loop back to earlier ones as new insights emerge.

Challenge A

For Challenge A, I chose a topic related to statistics, which naturally aligns with my academic background and made it easier to explain core ideas. Concepts such as mean and mode are not only fundamental to data analysis but also closely tied to real-life decision-making, which reflects the purpose of this project. Instead of relying on online comic-creation tools, I hand-drew simple sketches on my computer. This choice helped maintain visual simplicity and supported the Coherence Principle by minimizing unnecessary distractions.

Additionally, I intentionally exaggerated the characters’ expressions to capture attention and enhance emotional engagement without compromising comprehension—an approach inspired by the Personalization Principle. Overall, I was satisfied with how this project balanced clarity and engagement. However, upon reflection, I realized that hand-drawing might have limited the visual polish of my final output.

Challenge B

In the selection of the topic for Challenge B, based on the consideration of “the degree of help to people’s real life”, my team members and I chose procrastination as the theme after discussion. We first planned to clarify why procrastination occurs among students and what emotional or cognitive patterns are involved. We observed that it often stems from anxiety and perfectionism rather than pure laziness after discussion.

Overall, the process of this project allowed me to apply design thinking more consciously than in Challenge A. I realized that the key to effective educational design is not perfection at the first attempt, but the willingness to iterate, test, and learn. The experience also deepened my understanding of how visual storytelling can make abstract psychological topics, like procrastination that we chose, more accessible and empathetic to audiences.