Design Thinking

I have been anticipating learning about design thinking at The Mind Lab since the course began. I just love seeing kids bring their ideas to life in the real world, making things with their hands!

Design thinking gives us a method to confidently solve problems, rather than the horrible feeling of waiting for an idea to appear out of thin air! It gives people confidence that they have a process to fall back on. I believe that divergent creative skills are lacking in school today's schools, but are an essential 21st century skills.  Not having a framework to help us come up with great ideas and actually make them happen, is why it is so hard to innovate. I know I lack a strategy when it come to innovating.

This evening at The Mind Lab we experienced "design thinking" as we worked through the Kite Model to empathise, define, ideate, prototype, test and reflect. 

The person behind the kite is a human - design thinking is social, is all about human needs - we are designing for people! 

Here is what we did at each stage of our design thinking journey:

Empathise

We interviewed our customer, asking questions and recording their answers... we were then asked to dig deeper and ask, WHY? (at least 5 times to get to the emotive truth of the problem - how the person really felt). We had to observe what our customer said and didn't say, and feel what it was like to stand in their shoes. 

Define

We record our observations about the problems and define one specific problem. 

Ideate 

The first ideas that come to our minds are often not new. We had to sketch (NOT WRITE) at least 9 ideas. We then shared our ideas with our customer asking for feedback using the statements, "I like..." and "I wonder...". We then went on to ideate further (don't be satisfied straight away) to create another new idea. 

Prototype 

Thinking with our hands. The aim of prototyping is to drive the idea forward in our minds, to test it out, communicate with our customer in a way that is cheap and takes little time and effort. 

Reflect

We thought about the risks we took, how we listened to our customer and if thought about what change we would make next.  found innovation really makes you think... and then think again and again!

And most importantly (I think) is it isn't all about the product, as design thinking is iterative... meaning it loops around and around as we reflect and learn more how the problem we are wanting to solve and how it could be fixed. 

I think that the Design Thinking model will be a great structure to my innovation from Digital #1. The Design Thinking model fits within the digital curriculum as it requires kids to solve problems  (using computational thinking) and the kids switch roles from being consumers of technology to producers.

I wonder how the social and collaborative aspects could create a space of language in a abundance in an authentic way, as the kids listen, empathise, give and receive feedback and communicate (by talking, sketching, using their hands and writing).