Learning about the five main habits of innovation and design was very interesting for me this semester and fun to try to use. I think the one that I gravitated the most towards was failing forward and learning to be ok with being wrong. I think this was one that I half struggled with, and half was using it before this semester. I would struggle with it in some areas of my life, such as if I got a question wrong or if my design wouldn’t come out how I wanted it to be, I would just give up sometimes. Other times, such as when pursuing goals of mine, if there was an obstacle in the way or I failed one time at it, I would have the persistence to keep going. I think this habit especially showed for me during this last project where when I lost track of doing my challenge, instead of just giving up on it completely, I reworked it and found something that works better for me that still achieves the goal that I wanted.
The other habit that was fun for me was Child’s eye. I think I’ve always been pretty detail-oriented, and a lot of times, when I’m walking around, I will notice things because I like to look around and take in my surroundings. It has become more constant, and now when I’m at home, I’m always looking around and using a lot of my senses to take in the world around me.
The habit that I still want to work on embracing ambiguity. Right now, I am still really bad with it, especially when thinking about big ambiguous questions such as “what do I want to do with my life.” I am a person who needs a little bit of structure and likes to be goal-oriented so that I have something to focus on. In this case, though, where I have no clue what I want to do with my life after college, I am stressing. I think that I can practice growing with this habit by giving myself some constraints like using a constraint map. I also could just jump off the high dive into the deep end and go down one path, knowing that there is always the testing and iteration and that I can then later change my mind and go down a different way. Overall really liked this course and have had fun learning about these five habits and hope to continue to use them and the processes I’ve learned in my everyday life and career going forward.