Final Blogpost Question
Six weeks have flown by and my Eduro Design Thinking course is winding down. The question for our last blogpost is
How do you plan to maintain momentum within your classroom/department/school around Design Thinking principles?
Take-Aways
One big take-away from this course for me is that Design Thinking is about not having the answer “baked” into the question. Teachers tend to have a pretty clear idea of what outcomes they want to see and feel that their job is to steer their students to their closest approximation of what they “see”as the best answer. Design Thinking for the teacher is about “letting go” and letting questions pose themselves to students organically and the “answers” to the questions to be developed by the students in response.
For an example, Design Thinking would not ask students to build a better kitchen tool and work off a rubric to guide their design. It would be more a question of designing a better cooking experience for people. You don’t know what the solution looks like at the start. You don’t even have a clear idea of what the problem is going to be!
The first step would be asking people what they wanted and then going from there. This brings me to my second big take-away from the course: Design Thinking is rooted in Empathy and the catalyst that sets the student off to “design” is wanting to help someone.
Sustaining Momentum
I think I will be able to sustain momentum around Design Thinking principles by questioning more why things are they way they are, and being open to big paradigm shifts regarding what solutions might “look like”. Perhaps I can start my own “Design Thinking” notebook to jot down things I see and to challenge what I see by brainstorming some ideas for change or improvement, and noting them down. Who knows? Perhaps one of these might become the seed for real change and improvement in a system somewhere in the school.
The Starbuck Experience
I remember being so stunned and impressed by how Starbucks coffee changed the look of a coffee house. I was equally amazed when the Chapters Bookstore chain started in Canada and they integrated the “Starbuck” experience into their bookstores. (They made a bookstore feel like a Starbuck’s coffee house.)
During the Design Thinking course, I came across an account of a school that didn’t have room for a computer lab. So, the solution was developed (through Design Thinking) to put the computers into the school cafeteria and to re-design the cafeteria to feel more like a Starbuck’s coffee house, where the students ate, but could also work on homework etc.
So, these are all pretty big shifts in look and feel, quite unexpected as compared to what one would usually expect.
I will try to remember that solutions may look really different from what I expect them to look!
Design Thinking Final Project
My final project for this Design Thinking course is a MYP Design & Technology Unit. It’s a unit to explicitly teach students Design Thinking. I envision it to be delivered near the beginning of the school year. Afterwards, we could refer back to this unit as we moved forward throughout the rest of the year. Hopefully as a result, students would start incorporating Design Thinking elements and principles into the rest of their D&T units.
My Design Thinking Unit challenges students to “Build a Better Homeroom Experience”. I’ve been a secondary school homeroom teacher (many years ago) when my homeroom was a collection of students from every grade from Y7 to Y13. The students stuck to sitting by the one or two classmates that were in their grade. They ignored the rest as they were in different grades and therefore didn’t know them. You can imagine the huge differences that exist between Y7 and Y13 students! Homeroom was a boring, tedious routine of attendance-taking and giving out school announcements. It was an administrative activity and little more. Once in awhile, teachers were asked to undertake some “team-building” activities but they fell pretty flat, because it felt contrived. It felt contrived because it was contrived.
I wondered what solutions could be developed to address the disconnect. Would it be possible to Build a Better Homeroom Experience? In the unit, I challenge the students to come up with solutions that address as many of the 5 senses as possible: seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching.
After I had fleshed out this six week Design Thinking unit, the light started to dawn on me what Design Thinking really is.
I’ve come a significant way from my early days in this course when I thought Design Thinking was the familiar Design Cycle that I already knew.
My Definition of Design Thinking
Design Thinking is a human-centred approach to solving problems. It is rooted in empathy as its focus is helping people. Solutions are generated after really listening to people. Quick prototypes are built based on our findings in order to get feedback. We take the feedback and continue to refine the solution. This cycle continues with those we are helping, until we find a personalized solution to their problem.
Looking Ahead
I feel that this course has given me a broader understanding of what problem-solving in design can look like. It has an obvious place in Design & Technology classes, Maker Education environments, but it is also a way of looking at life, at people, and at problems that can be applied to a myriad of places. I’m excited to add it to my growing list of ways to Inquire in the classroom. It fits in well to the IB framework, as well, because one of the traits in the IB Learner Profile is Caring. The empathy where Design Thinking is rooted is “caring” definitely.
It’s interesting to look at different frame-works as you see things from a different perspective and from ones that you didn’t even know existed.
I don’t think I’ll look at my environment or problems that I encounter in the same way, ever again.
What is a pressing problem that you have, that you will address by Design Thinking?
~Vivian