I am a big fan of Design Thinking and Project Based Learning and have helped teachers implement at the high school and graduate level. I am NOT an expert but every time I used design thinking, I always doubt myself, I am not sure of my skills when facilitating. But what I have noticed each time is about half way through the process I see collaboration, creativity and students enjoying learning!
As we head into June and kids are tired of screens I find they either want to play a game, go outside of do an activity. Who can blame them, it's been a challenging year!
So this month we did a Virtual STEM night as a school that students could do with their families. The idea was an 8th grade student fundraiser project. When I was asked to participate on a Friday night, I thought, this is too hard to do this activity this year. Well, I was wrong. We organized the evening based on a presentation at MassCUE from the Littleton School district. I setup a flipgrid so families could share out their design challenge. It was so great to see families work together to solve a problem and the record their findings. So, this sparked me thinking about the next few weeks and implementing design challenges with students.
We did the 5 Chair Design and Wallet Challenge this month! Presentation here
The wallet design challenge (originally “Wallet Project”) is a 90-minute design thinking project from the d.school in which participants pair up, learn about each others’ wallets, brainstorm, and prototype a new useful and meaningful solution for their partner. It is an engaging and immersive activity into the full-cycle of the design thinking process, stressing the importance of empathy, bias towards action, and human-centered design. Participants jump right into the challenge (any lecturing or mention to the actual methods used is completely discouraged) and experience the process for themselves. After all, as taught at the d.school, design thinking is a misnomer: it is more about doing that thinking.
Note: If you plan to run this or a similar workshop in your organization, make sure to check the facilitators’ guide and other resources provided by the d.school.
Designing the ideal wallet
The first task of the challenge is to tell participants to design a better wallet, the “ideal” wallet. The purpose of this step is to contrast a solution-focused approach to problem solving (typical for many people, specially in engineering environments) to a human-centered approach, in which instead of being given a problem and going right into a solution, you explore the problem space and dive deeper, observing, listening and learning from the person you are designing for. Designing for someone else is a longer process, and the first and most important step in this process is to gain empathy.
Gaining Empathy
The next step in the challenge is to have participants pair up, and ask them to design some “useful and meaningful” for their partner. Participants interview each other and walk their partner thought the content of their wallets. Asking “Why?” often is a great way to elicit stories and dig for feelings and emotions.
*See Class Tweets Intro -
Reframing the problem
After learning and collecting stories from their partners, participants are given some time to gather their thoughts and synthesize their leanings into goals and insights. Goals represent participants’ needs. Goals should be thought as verbs instead of nouns (ever heard of Henry’s Ford quote: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”?), since nouns already bring solutions to the table and reduce the chances of finding new opportunities. Insights are responses and discoveries related to those needs, inferences from what was previously learned.
Ideating: Brainstorming and generating alternatives
Once the participants have formulated their problem statement, they are ready to generate ideas to overcome that problem. Indeed, the best way to get great ideas is to get a lot of ideas: going for quantity, deferring all judgement, encouraging wild ideas, and being visual is basically everything that’s needed in this step (do not think even remotely about feasibility).
Iterating based on feedback
Capturing feedback is a critical part of the design thinking process. When participants share their ideas with each other, they should understand the importance of listening and fighting the urge to defend and explain their concepts. Being open to feedback generates opportunities (new insights) to learn more about the users and their problems. In this step, participants will generate a single idea which can be based on their previous ideas or be something completely new.
Building and testing
This is without any doubt my favorite part of the workshop: rapid and dirty prototyping! Creating a physical representation of a solution is the easiest, quickest, and cheapest way to validate ideas and get feedback from others. More than a scale model of an idea, a prototype can be used to test experiences that people can react to through interaction and engagement. Participants make use of any available materials they have and build something tangible to be shared with their partners to gather feedback, paying attention to how they use and misuse the prototype and always keeping an open mind for new ideas.
Reflection and takeaways
In the last step of the workshop, the whole group gathers together and shares their prototypes with others. The debrief and reflection part of the exercise has the power to turn a merely fun activity into a meaningful experience with takeaways that participants can apply in their field of work and life. In about one hour and half, participants realized how easy it can be to know and engage with each other; and they learned how to work together and combine their skills to create and build things that they care about, for people who they care about.
Summary
It would be impossible to list all the values behind human-centered design: empathy, experimentation and prototyping, collaboration, overcoming fear of failure, a bias towards action and openness to feedback are at the essence of the design thinking process.
Presentations
I created a slide deck and each person presented their findings. This could easily be done in a flipgrid to record and share with a larger audience.
Another great connection to the process was to use this with the HS Design Thinking projects this month! It's great to connect with other educators and continue to celebrate student work!
