Thinking Space – Design Thinking

Design Thinking Process

• The Design Thinking Process - IDEO U

  • Frame a Question, Gather Inspiration, Generate Ideas, Make Ideas Tangible, Test to Learn, and Share the Story

  • 8 Design Abilities

  • Design Thinking Handbook (free audiobook or text version)

• Design Thinking model proposed by the Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (d.school)

  • Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test, Assess

• The Design Process - Design Squad Nation 

• Thinkering Studio Process Options

Why?

• To provide students a starting framework for an often messy, recursive process

• It help students understand the needs of the people (audience) they are designing for

• It is a process designed to encourage creativity and innovation

• It pushes you to test your ideas and prototypes and iterate on your ideas

Why Not?

• Takes time to learn

• The process can be time consuming, especially if you are also teaching the process at the same time

• Without careful instruction, modeling and practice the process can be used as a staid linear process

"Skills" & "Knowledge"

• What skills/knowledge are needed for design thinking or need to be developed?

  • 8 Design Abilities: Navigate Ambiguity; Learn from Others; Experiment Rapidly; Synthesize Information; Communicate Deliberately; Move Between Concrete and Abstract; Build and Craft Intentionally; and Design Your Design Work

  • Following a general design process or synthesizing a personalized design process from a variety of processes

  • Following a linear process in the beginning, navigating a recursive process once familiar, and then modifying or personalizing the process using steps from other processes

  • Questioning

    • Problem finding

    • Challenge finding

    • Rich topic finding

  • Empathy / Understanding Points of View

  • Teamwork

    • Listening

    • Conferencing

      • Critiquing

      • P.U.S.H.

    • Commenting

  • Drawing prototype plans (by hand or with electronic tools)

  • Prototyping

    • DIY skills

    • 2d & 3d Design and "Printing"

  • Reflection/Metacognition

  • How to deal with "failure"?

  • Being comfortable with being uncomfortable

  • Embracing and navigating ambiguity

  • Documenting process & product - Show unfinished work

  • Developing & modifying assessments of projects

  • Which Habits of Mind would belong here? How do they overlap with the 8 Design Abilities?

  • These new standards sound connected, but alas, the problem finding part is missing (or maybe it is implied). Standards for Engineering, Technology, and the Applications of Science

Questions & Thoughts

• Real problems - I understand the value in real problems. No argument the focus should be there. But, what about also including theoretical/hypothetical problems? What if it is more of a challenge than a problem? What if it's an interesting question? A hypothesis? What about rich topics or tools that they want to explore before considering a problem or need?

• "It's a creative place where responsibility for making learning choice start and end with the student." Completely open? So a teacher's role is only persuasive? What about setting up what the choices are sometimes? What about a balance of student directed and teacher directed activities?
  
  The responsibility STARTS and ENDS with the student, but the teacher's role in between is crucial, and it's beyond simply persuasion. What do we know about choice? That the optimum number of choices is somewhere above three, but under 20 (Iyengaar and Lepper). In practice, this means that the teacher is making an initial choice of which exploratory area the class will explore: it's like a designer's brief where the client (the teacher, the curriculum) has an idea of what they want achieved/assessed, but the means of getting there are "open to tender", open to the choices of students.
  
  That choice is facilitated with an initial set of content and resources (Empathy / Observation of the initial immersion). I'd suggest that these resources are not taught in a sequential way by the teacher, but placed at the students' disposition to attack in the order and way that they wish. You might want to use Six Thinking Hats to again offer some structure to their thinking, or teach them to recognise where their thinking is at with the SOLO taxonomy, for example. All these taxonomies become helpful within the frame of students perceiving their choice as being greater than if the teacher is deciding the questions for them to answer.
  
  Synthesis involves the students finding the questions they wish to solve, not the teacher. In a class of 30 you might end up with about six or seven big questions that pass the students' peer-to-peer (and with teacher) "scrutiny" test: does it pass the "so what?" test of a 14 year old, and does it pass the teachers' understanding of what likely curricular areas will be 'covered'? If not, take it back to the drawing board with some two stars and a wish, for example.

• Does this process work the same way if we replace student with teacher and curriculum with professional development?
  Absolutely. There is a difference between action research (where someone from on high gives you the topic to research) and practitioner research (where the practitioner chooses his or her area of development). The same with students, there is a risk that the teacher chooses a weak question to explore, and is 'done' within two sessions. Teachers, too, need a peer-to-peer scrutiny option.

• Overall process - How recursive do you find this? How do you develop that understanding in students?
  Bit by bit. It's a circular process, perhaps, rather than linear, and every time teacher and student undertake it, they get better. That's why feedback from groups such as yourself is so important for us. We've "only" be working on this with teachers for about two years, so we need to get formative feedback to help us on our journey, too.

  • So scaffolding the process in a more step by step way in the beginning might be required? The goal being to learn the "rules" and then break the rules? "Science" vs. "Art"?

    • Design Thinking Is A Failed Experiment. So What’s Next?

• Socialized? - "The process also involves the physical space of school as the place where ideas are socialised for the first time, often with people from outside the class, or even outside the school, through a project corner."

• Are these problems typically tackled individually, in small group, as a whole class or all of them? - "Design thinking, by its highly personalised nature means that the teacher can offer fairly generalist structures for developing ideas and still be assured of a highly individualised experience for each learner."
  
  Great collaborative work also needs plenty of time alone to reflect, consider one's own contributions and where one wants to go next. Likewise, the complexity of the problems mean that more than one brain will be needed to make sense of it. Again, how the teacher forms groups - or helps students understand how to better group themselves - is vital. The goal here is not necessarily putting together students with precisely the same problem to solve. It's putting together students with different outlooks and skills to offer the group. This is why cross-age coaching is so powerful - if you can mix up age and stage you get an even more powerful collaborative effect but, again, individual space is required to make sense of what has been achieved, and what needs to be worked on harder.

• Do we think through this the same way if we are considering a project, class, program (Engage), or the whole school?
  I think so. It gets increasingly complex, and maybe the easiest way to start thinking this way is to move from one to the other. Don't take on the world at once, as it were.Is one more likely to be coopted by the status quo than another? Might the bigger jump be more difficult but possibly necessary to make enough of a break?

• What's the balance between discovery based learning, workshop like with mini lessons as needed, and more teacher directed projects?
  I think teacher-directed projects lasting weeks will never engage in the same way as a project the student perceives as being in charge of, taking responsibility for. We know that great learning happens when students are actually taking responsibility for their learning, have respect given to their way of learning (and aren't 'saved' too quickly by the teacher when it looks like it's going wrong). The mini-lessons are likely to happen very often - learning just in time, as several students find a blockage that they need a demo or some specific help on. Your class becomes more like a professional lab or studio, with teacher as coach ready to provide mini-lectures and demos as required. Teacher on call, not teacher on duty…

• How do you get students to the point of wanting to "read" feedback?

• How many design projects should students do each year to experience the Whole Game? What other types of projects might work on some of the skills in the process?

• Are there mini lessons for certain skills built in, based on what the kids ask for (or need)?

• 8 Design Abilities

  • What about Perkins et al's "dispositions"?

  • Are they skills you transfer? Do these develop as you use the Design Process, or ...?

• How would/could you modify design thinking processes to work online (and maybe asynchronously)? Or, hybrid?

  • What tech tools could enable/afford good/better options than pencil & paper?

• How could you modify design thinking processes to work for a student who chooses an individual project? 

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Connections to Other Ideas

• Mitch Resnick

  • Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity through Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play

  • Learning from Scratch presentation at Learning Without Frontiers 2012

  • Sowing the Seeds for a More Creative Society article

    • Creative Thinking Spiral: Imagine, Create, Play, Share, Reflect

• d.school K12 Lab

  • The Design Thinking Bootcamp Bootleg

  • Crash Course(80 min video)

    • 2:25 - Overview of Design Process

      • "Think about it a little bit more as a set of mindfullnesses. We teach it in a linear way, but as you finish we'll talk a little bit more about how to use it in a non-linear way."

      • What questions did participants ask during the time they had to work to clarify what they were doing?

    • 34:00 - Problem Statement - "Short, Specific, and Sexy. If it takes more than 1 breath to articulate your problem statement, it may not be short enough."

    • 42:00 - Test/Feedback - "Seek learning not validation."

    • Final 5 minutes

      • bias toward action

      • collaborate across boundaries

      • focus on human values

      • be mindful of process

      • prototype toward a solution

      • show don’t tell

      • How did engaging with a real person and testing your prototype with a real person change the direction that your prototype took?

      • What was it like showing unfinished work to another human being?

      • How did the pace feel?

      • It is an iterative process, which step would you go back to do more of? What would you do next if you had it to do it over again?

• IDEO- obvious connections, any important differences when translated for students?

  • The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design

• Challenge Based Learning

  • Big Idea

  • Essential Question

  • The Challenge

  • Guiding Questions, Activities, & Resources

  • Solution-Action

  • Assessment

  • Publishing

• Big 6

  • 1. Task Definition

    • 1.1 Define the information problem

    • 1.2 Identify information needed

  • 2. Information Seeking Strategies

    • 2.1 Determine all possible sources

    • 2.2 Select the best sources

  • 3. Location and Access

    • 3.1 Locate sources (intellectually and physically)

    • 3.2 Find information within sources

  • 4. Use of Information

    • 4.1 Engage (e.g., read, hear, view, touch)

    • 4.2 Extract relevant information

  • 5. Synthesis

    • 5.1 Organize from multiple sources

    • 5.2 Present the information

  • 6. Evaluation

    • 6.1 Judge the product (effectiveness)

    • 6.2 Judge the process (efficiency)

• Research Cycle(McKenzie)

  • Questioning, Planning, Gathering, Sorting & Sifting, Synthesizing, Evaluating, Reporting

• Tinkering School

• Perkins' Whole Game - Are there junior versions of design thinking so that we can play the whole game of Design Thinking later?

• Perkins' Knowledge as Design

• BCS' Engage

• PBS' Design Squad - The Design Process In Action

  • Design Squad Maker Toolkit

• MIT's D-Lab & Amy Smith

• The I Can Invent Mindset (Invent.org)

• STEM Activity: The Invention Superpower of Empathy (Invent.org)

Notes

• Immersion - Prior knowledge is often an impediment to developing authentic (to the kids' mind), quality questions, problems, or challenges. The immersion process/stage helps address that.

• Techniques Mentioned

  • Ping Pong and Basketball Questioning - Pose, Pause, Pounce, Bounce

  • "EduJazz" - When/how to follow the F#

More Resources

• Design Process

  • Design Process Graphic (slides)

  • Prototyping

• Critiques of Design Process

  • Design Thinking Is A Failed Experiment. So What’s Next?

  • “Design Thinking” Isn’t a Miracle Cure, but Here’s How It Helps

  • Beware the Digital Whiteboard

  • Limitations of design thinking

• Design Process in the Classroom

  • The Case Against Grades - Alfie Kohn

  • And What Do You Mean by Learning? by Seymour B. Sarason

• Projects & Examples

  • Curriculum For Invention (MIT)

  • Design Squad (PBS)

• Designing and Refining Lessons With Colleagues: Tips for Constructive Friends

• What Schools Can Learn From Google, IDEO, and Pixar

• When choice is demotivating: Can one desire too much of a good thing?

  • Diane Rehm interview of Sheena Iyengar, author of "The Art of Choosing"

• Ewan Mcintosh blog and Design Thinking School and process

  • The Problem Finders Talk and Script: http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/2011/11/tedxlondon-the-problem-finders-video.html
    How to teach from the bandstand: http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/2012/02/do-you-teach-from-the-bandstand.html 

  • An overview (brief) of design thinking (early 2011): http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/2011/03/if-you-want-to-truly-engage-students-give-up-the-reins.html 

  • Rationale for design thinking: an overview of Guy Claxton's What's The Point Of School: http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/2011/11/guy-claxton-whats-the-point-of-school.html 

  • Rationale for design thinking in school management: http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/2010/09/design-thinking-solves-impossible-problems-best-and-worst.html 

  • Finding the right problems to solve: http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/2011/11/finding-the-right-problems-to-solve-gladwell-on-the-norden-bombsight.html 

  • An overview of immersion in practice: http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/2012/01/design-thinking-2-immersion-dont-give-students-a-problem-to-solve.html 

  • An example of a makers' curriculum: http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/2011/12/the-inspiring-maker-curriculum-in-darlington.html 

  • An example of design thinking in English language: http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/2010/09/design-thinking-project-based-learning-in-action-in-scotlands-curriculum-for-excellence.html 

  • The challenge of collaboration: http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/2012/01/collaboration-1-collaboration-is-the-key-influence-in-the-quality-of-teaching.html 

  • The role of coaching: The Granny Cloud from Sugata Mitra: http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/2011/01/sugata-mitra-the-granny-cloud.html