Design Thinking: Lessons for the Classroom The Design Thinking Process While design thinking has its roots in the innovation/design sector, the process itself can be used anywhere. Indeed, it is a great tool for teaching 21st century skills, as participants must solve problems by finding and sorting through information, collaborating with others, and iterating their solutions based on real world, authentic experience and feedback. (It is also a great tool to develop and run a school, but that's a different post for a different day.) I had the good fortune to participate in a collaborative workshop at the Big Ideas Fest, where we practiced design thinking with about 12 other educators over a three-day period. Practitioners of design thinking have different steps depending on their needs. 1) Identify Opportunity 2) Design 3) Prototype 4) Get Feedback 5) Scale and Spread 6) Present In design thinking, you work through the steps together in small groups (or "Collabs" as they were called at BIF2011). Six Design Thinking Steps
5 | Frog Creates An Open-Source Guide To Design Thinking Brainstorming, whether you believe in it or shun it, is a fantastic neologism. But as Frog Principal Designer David Sherwin has found, it’s also a very American word--one that doesn’t exist in every language. “We were in Bangladesh, trying to translate the idea into Bengali,” says Sherwin, remembering a recent trip his team spent working with teenage girls on community issues. “One of the translators on our team wrote up on the board, brain + storm. It couldn’t be translated.” Sherwin’s experience touches on a crucial problem for many NGOs and foundations attempting to transpose Western methods of social innovation to other cultures. Today, Frog will release the Collective Action Toolkit, a free, 72-page booklet that seeks to develop a universal framework for people of all ages and cultural backgrounds to tackle big problems in their communities. Check out the Collective Action Toolkit for yourself here.
Iterative Design: Towards the Perfect Paper Plane Iterative design isn’t design by trial and error. Iterative design is a process of continually improving not just the design, but also the problem your design is trying to solve. Coming up with a solution is often the most straightforward part of the design process. That isn’t to say that creating the solution is easy, or doesn’t require a deep knowledge and honed skill set. A good problem statement gives a tight set of constraints within which to work. Marissa Mayer, the Google VP for User Experience, said it well: “When people think about creativity, they think about artistic work — unbridled, unguided effort that leads to beautiful effect. I’ve been on a quest for the last 16 years. But my quest didn’t start with the duration as its goal. Design Goal: Make a paper-plane Like most kids, my first airplane was the “dart”. After playing with the dart for a bit, I was unsatisfied: it flies less like a airplane than a rock with ersatz wings. These two requirements led to a new design goal.
Design Thinking: Creative Ways to Solve Problems Tinkering Hands: Students at a suburban San Francisco school work on redesigning a preschool room. Designers see the world differently than the rest of us. What if the same were true for the learning process? By applying the techniques of product design to education, they want to loosen the narrow, rigid process of traditional learning and show teachers how to tap into students' deep wells of creativity, encourage them to see nuanced problems from inside the very core of an issue, and make critical thinking essential to solving any problem. The k12 Lab has distilled the design process down to the following steps: Understand, Observe, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. Melissa Pelochino, a teacher at an economically disadvantaged school in nearby East Palo Alto, is a k12 Lab convert. "Our kids spend their time trying to figure out what answer the teacher wants to hear rather than on what they want to say," she explains. PDF [4.1 mb] Download: k12 Lab's Design Challenge tool kit
WhatIsCognitiveDesign What is Cognitive Design? Cognitive Design is an instructional design process that focuses on cognitive principles of learning. It augments the traditional instructional system design (ISD), which is a procedural-workflow model, with a principle-based methodology. The goal is to construct E-Learning products and activities that are "Learner-Centric." The cognitive design process provides a rational framework for the instructional development lifecycle. Performance Improvement Environments: Knowledge Management, E-Learning, and Performance Support Four Key Design Elements: Information, Instruction, Media and Delivery System Principles of Cognitive Learning: Multimedia Learning, Management of Cognitive Load, Interactive Engagement and Performance-based Instruction. Principle-based Instructional Design This section will focus on the application of the model in design process — reviewing the practical issues of principle-based instructional design: What are the Benefits? Substance, not Surface
Stanford Design Thinking Workbook A little background on the project The project you’re holding in your hands is an iteration on the d.school’s iconic “Wallet Project.” The original wallet project was created as an introduction to designthinking or the d.school’s inaugural Boot Camp class in the Winter o 2006. It has since been contributed to, modied, stretched, and evolved by many d.schoolcollaborators.The Wallet Project is an immersive activity meant to give participants a ull cycle through the design thinking process in as short a time as possible. The projectitsel gives acilitators the opportunity to touch on the undamental values o the d.school—human-centered design, a bias towards action, and a culture o iterationand rapid prototyping—without attempting to communicate all o the methods and activities that the term “design thinking” encompasses.Why did we choose a wallet as the starting point or the introductory design challenge? ci e able or participants. Why project-based, team-facilitated learning? do lead
One guy on Yelp Innovation 101: Stanford's d.school Teaches Students to Be Creative Hollywood Tragedy or Healthy Parenting? | Danoah Unleashed with Dan Pearce Booze. Parties. Sex. When you string those powerful words together, it sounds like the dastardly headline of yet another Hollywood tragedy. But what if booze, parties, and sex actually help a lot of parents be better parents? But before you string me up by my ankles for defacing the sanctity of parenthood, read the following paragraphs and let’s have an interesting discussion about it. 1) Tanya, a single mother of two, really enjoys any chance she can find for booze, parties, and sex. And… 2) Tanya, a single mother of two amazing girls, works two jobs to make ends meet. These are obviously two very different paragraphs, yet essentially they both say the same thing, don’t they? As outsiders, we tend to watch other parents, and we scrutinize their every action. But so often in life, moms and dads like Tanya are some of the best moms and dads of our time. Yet at the same time they are fantastic parents, very unfairly, many in the world see them and only ever see paragraph #1.
The Seven Deadly Sins That Choke Out Innovation In most companies, there's a profound tension between the right-brainers (for lack of a better term) espousing design, design thinking and user-centered approaches to innovation and the left-brained, more spreadsheet-minded among us. Most C-suites are dominated by the latter, all of whom are big fans of nice neat processes and who pay good money to get them implemented rigorously. So often, the innovation process is treated as a simple, neat little machine. Last night, Ryan Jacoby, the heads of IDEO's New York practice, gave a talk at NYU/Poly with just that tension in mind, titled Leading Innovation: Process Is No Substitute. 1: Thinking the answer is in here, rather than out there "We all get chained to our desks and caught up in email," he said. 2: Talking about it rather than building it This one related to the last. 3: Executing when we should be exploring 4: Being smart "If you're scared to be wrong, you won't be able to lead innovation or lead the innovation process," he said.
Community Network Blogs What is happening during a sunny Saturday on the SAP Labs Palo Alto campus and its vicinities? Only a flip chart sign in the lobby building 3 that says “Design Thinking workshop go to fourth floor”, some empty pizza boxes and about 15 heads full of ideas for future playground designs are left. What happened? Is there anything else left? Three women were on a mission, on a mission to spread the word of Design Thinking within SAP and beyond. Instead of waiting for any formal training or investing in books and other reading materials – they said lets “just do it”. The three of us plus 12 committed colleagues from SAP, all from many different SAP organizations, immersed for a day into Design Thinking. The group consisted of many different disciplines as well as different cultural backgrounds. Stakeholders? “Design Thinking is a methodology for practical, creative resolution of problems or issues that looks for an improved future result.” So, what else is part of Design Thinking?
www.humansinvent.com What Schools Can Learn From Google, IDEO, and Pixar | Co. Design A community about to build or rehab a school often creates checklists of best practices, looks for furniture that matches its mascot, and orders shiny new lockers to line its corridors. These are all fine steps, but the process of planning and designing a new school requires both looking outward (to the future, to the community, to innovative corporate powerhouses) as well as inward (to the playfulness and creativity that are at the core of learning). In many ways, what makes the Googles of the world exceptional begins in the childhood classroom -- an embrace of creativity, play, and collaboration. Learning from IDEO: A transparent space where projects take the spotlight The design and innovation firm IDEO tacitly understands how office environments help or hinder the creative process. [Photos by Steve Hall] What would it mean for schools to have a culture centered on design thinking and interdisciplinary projects instead of siloed subjects? [Photo by James Steinkamp]
Napkin Labs Turns IDEO's Innovation Process Into Web Apps For All | Co. Design Somewhere in between the work we're paid to do and the work we want to do lies what Riley Gibson calls a "creative surplus." People have a need to explore, make, photograph, draw, and collaborate on ideas that are important to them, including the products and services they're passionate about. The key for a brand, he says, is to give those people better direction to end up with insight they can actually use. His startup Napkin Labs is a customizable crowdsourcing platform that takes conventional collaboration one step further. It will offer a set of apps that guide users through the "design thinking" process -- that is, the innovation process pioneered by IDEO and now used by design firms and companies the world over. Gibson and his business partner began their careers as consultants for creative agencies, working with teams to generate new product ideas and conduct market research. As a video demonstrates, a company can create a challenge and invite customers to contribute.