We left early in the morning so as not to miss our appointment with Markus and his business partner. We met in their apartment to discuss the details of the website project.

Another appointment with Dr. Joann Halpern was scheduled for Friday afternoon. One group left earlier to visit a spot near Times Square, where you can walk through an impressive water tunnel and see an interesting statue right next door.

At a quarter to three, we made our way to the Hudson Yards skyscraper, where Dr. Halpern greeted us on the 51st floor of the SAP premises. After taking in the view from so high up, we got down to the topic Dr. Halpern wanted to talk about: the power of design thinking.

By telling about a MRI specialized for kids, she explained the importance of well-designed products and the experience of going through a coordinated iterative design process. The problem with the MRI for children was that the children were too afraid of the big machine and could not remain calm in the tube. So the aim was to make the MRI suitable for children. A design thinking process was used to achieve this: first understand the problem, then observe it, determine the point of view, work out ideas, develop a prototype and finally test it. But the big difference in this design thinking process is its structure: not linear, but iterative. It means going from the first step to the next, but also means going back one or two test phases again and repeating the steps to get a good result.

As a result, the whole MRI experience was redesigned as a kind of treasure hunt, after which the children actually enjoyed the experience and even wanted to come back.

She also familiarized us with the Hasso Plattner Institute, a research institution of SAP founder Hasso Plattner, which is also her employer.

She concluded the lecture with an interactive exercise that challenged our brain cells once again. We thanked Dr. Halpern for the interesting lecture and took the opportunity to capture the skyline once again.

We wanted to make dinner at home tonight, so we picked up the right ingredients for pasta and cinque-pi at Target.