Digital - Week 8

Design Thinking Mindsets

These 7 Mindsets explore and uncover the philosophy behind IDEO's (2017) Design Kit’s approach to creative problem solving (there are a number of videos on that site to explain each of these):  Use this link to define the different areas.

• Embrace ambiguity
• Optimism
• Iterate, iterate, iterate
• Learn from Failure
• Make it
• Creative Confidence
• Empathy

Remember to get to know the customer, understand them, how they work, what they do. Listen to them.

Empathy - Humans are at the centre of design. You have to be able to see what happens when you jump into someone else's life.

DEO (2017) suggests that how you think about design directly affects whether you'll arrive at innovative, impactful solutions.

Design Thinking Kite by The Mind Lab by Unitec

In this week's session we'll try out The Mind Lab by Unitec Design Thinking Process + materials, which uses our 'kite' model: Empathise / Define / Ideate / Prototype / Test / Reflect

Change by Design

Tim Brown, the current CEO of IDEO, has written the book about Change by Design (2009). According to him, Design Thinking is Human-centered: ‘The basic problem is that people are so ingenious at adapting to inconvenient situations that they are often not even aware that they are doing so. Our real goal is helping people to articulate the latent needs they may not even know they have’. 

Observation is important too: ´When we observe people going about their daily lives, what is it that they don’t do or don’t say?´ as well as empathy, or as Brown calls it: 'Standing in the shoes of others'. Brown talks a lot about the importance of prototyping, because: ‘Like every other kid, I was thinking with my hands…’. If you want to hear him talking about his book, we recommend you listening to this radio show.

Making ideas tangible always facilitates communication

According to Brown 'Prototypes don’t have to be expensive or time-consuming. In fact, the opposite is better: Put as little time and effort into prototypes as you can and still generate useful feedback and drive an idea forward.'

(Re)capture the Creativity of your Childhood

de Saint-Exupéry (1943) wrote a story about The Little Prince where he tried to showcase that as we age, how we see the world changes. It is the rare person who is able to hold on to the sense of wonderment, of presence, creativity, or of sheer enjoyment of life and its possibilities that is so apparent in our younger selves. As we age, we gain experience and we become better able to exercise self-control. We become more in command of our faculties, our thoughts, our desires. But somehow, we lose sight of the effortless ability to take in the world in full. The very experience that helps us become successful threatens to limit our imagination and our sense of the possible. When did experience ever limit the fantasy of a child? 

One part of the story of Little Prince also relates to customer communication, and to latent needs. At one point, the little prince is asked by a boy to draw a picture of a sheep. After several attempts that fail to meet with approval, the little prince just draws a box with holes in it:

"‘This is only his box. The sheep you asked for is inside.’ I was very surprised to see a light break over the face of my young judge: ‘That is exactly the way I wanted it!’".

Like the little prince, you don't know what your or your customers want and neither do they - until you show it to them.

Four principles to Design Thinking (Plattner, Meinel & Leifer, 2010)

1. The human rule – all design activity is ultimately social in nature
2. The ambiguity rule – design thinkers must preserve ambiguity
3. The re-design rule – all design is re-design
4. The tangibility rule – making ideas tangible always facilitates communication

Teaching Practices that encourage Design Thinking

Immersion: Have students work together in small collaborative groups to do a deep dive into the subject/topic area. Ask the students to undertake research, observation and develop questionnaires or evaluate data to gain a technical, personal and community views on a topic.

Inquiry-based Feedback: Instead of value-based feedback, inquiry based feedback coupled with observation encourages a more open-ended and in-depth approach to learning. Students are encouraged to minimise expressing their likes and dislikes, and encouraged to first spend time silently observing, and then asking questions prefixed by phrases such as "I noticed that...," "why," and "how."

Before this process begins ensure students brainstorm ways to gather information. For example:

• Research that includes eBooks, case studies, experiments, data, academic papers etc
• Observation that includes personal viewing, filming, online videos, documentaries, recorded interviews
• Questionnaires that includes personal questionnaires, online surveys, research and data including census, government agency information, non-government organisation data, OECD reports etc.

Synthesis: Have students deduce interesting gaps to explore, problems to solve or opportunities to solve, using the information they have gathered from their immersion process.

Ideas on how to gain a new perspective

• Put visuals on the wall which relate to the topic but at the fringes of the core subject.
• Ask new questions. Create a how, when, why, what, who question and define the answers.

Note: Ask "thinking" questions – don’t make suggestions. Instead of asking questions to which there is a correct answer, ask students to create the problem. For example instead of saying "Does your girl need ears?" A thinking question would be, "What kind of music does your girl like to listen to? How can she hear the music?"

Students should pose their problem by first tapping into their own wishes and goals that might have real-life results or be largely theoretical and in end in the modeling stages. Such questions such as "How can we grow vegetables without using pesticides?" And, "How can we feed the world's population in a sustainable way?" Both encourage students to think divergently.

Questions, not suggestions, allow personal ownership based on observing, on experiences and on the imagination.

Zoom out: Put the subject/topic in the centre of focus and scale out to the next logical layer. For example if the topic was endangered tigers of India, scale back and look at the life of poachers, the local communities, the black market skin/medicine customers etc. Explore each logical layer of influence as you scale back from the heart of the topic to develop a macro view of the subject.

Ideation, Prototyping and Feedback: Have your students test ideas, solve a problem and extend their understanding without focusing on the ‘right’ answer. This part of the Design Thinking process helps students to 'hold their ideas lightly' in order to review and gain feedback from other student groups and their teacher/s.

The emphasis is on thinking skills and mindsets that allow students to create early and often, adjusting the course of their learning and applying an iterative approach to outcomes that is tweaked from the input of feedback.

Note: Nurture a culture of divergent thinking. Encourage students to be choice makers. Ask students ‘what their work needs’. If a student asks for help, assist by asking the child to give several of their ideas to discuss.

Implementation or Display: As ideas and defined the Design Thinking process moves to the celebration stage where concepts are shared. In this stage have students talk to the group about the changes they applied in their approach, what they reflected on, what evidence they found to support their findings and what new knowledge they gained or shared.

Organisational Focus on Design

Keep in mind that design thinking doesn’t solve all problems. As Kolko (2015) suggests, it helps people and organizations cut through complexity. It’s great for innovation. It works extremely well for imagining the future. An organisational focus on design offers unique opportunities for humanizing technology and for developing emotionally resonant products and services. Adopting this perspective isn’t easy. But doing so helps create a workplace where people want to be, one that responds quickly to changing business dynamics and empowers individual contributors. And because design is empathetic, it implicitly drives a more thoughtful, human approach to business.

Useful resources

• You are free to use our Mind Lab Design Kite model and printouts in your own practice. We strongly recommend reading out the facilitator guide on 'How to fly The Mind Lab Design Kite' to get started in the process. Fly the Design Thinking Kite high! And ask questions or share results on Twitter with the #MINDLABDT hashtag. To celebrate the te reo Māori, we also have the Wero Whakaaro Auaha -printouts that you are welcome to use in your own practice. 
• This free Design Thinking for Educators' toolkit, created by IDEO, contains the process and methods of design along with the Designer’s Workbook, adapted specifically for the context of K-12 education. It offers new ways to be intentional and collaborative when designing, and empowers educators to create impactful solutions. IDEO has also published a free Field Guide to Human-Centered Design reveals their process with the key mindsets that underpin how and why they think about design for the social sector, it has 57 clear-to-use design methods for new and experienced practitioners, and from-the-field case studies of human-centered design in action.
• Stanford University Institute of Design has created many useful resources, such as the Design thinking for teachers The K12 Lab Wiki and Design Thinking Crash Course that helps you to run or participate in a 90 minutes long design cycle by redesigning a Gift-Giving Project. They also provide materials for  Redesigning the school lunch experience and the  Foil-challenge. 
• You can also download the  FROG Collective Action Toolkit that has a similar set of activities and methods that enables groups of people anywhere to organise, collaborate, and create solutions for problems affecting their community.
• IBM shares their Enterprise focused Design Thinking Field Guide online. They encourage their staff to use design thinking, since it provides the speed and scale that the modern enterprise demands. It’s a framework for teaming and action. They claim that it helps their teams not only form intent, but deliver outcomes—outcomes that advance the state of the art and improve the lives of the people they serve. 
• For your personal interest, you might want to view the curriculum for the 6-week Design Kit: The Course for Human-Centered Design -course that will introduce you to the concepts of human-centered design and how this approach can be used to create innovative, effective, and sustainable solutions for social change.

Via Unitec library you have access to many interesting books and articles relating to Design Thinking. You could for example take a look at the 'Designing for growth a design thinking toolkit for managers'. In that book Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie cover the mindset, techniques, and vocabulary of design thinking; unpack the mysterious connection between design and growth; and teach managers, in a straightforward way, how to exploit design's exciting potential. They have also written a 'The designing for growth field book: a step-by-step project guide', in which they provide a step-by-step framework for applying the D4G toolkit and process to a particular project, systematically explaining how to address the four key questions of their design thinking approach.