This blog on Texas education contains posts on accountability, testing, K-12 education, postsecondary educational attainment, dropouts, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, environmental issues, Ethnic Studies at state and national levels. It also represents my digital footprint, of life and career, as a community-engaged scholar in the College of Education at the University of Texas at Austin.
Empathize: Learn about the audience for whom you are designing
Define: Construct a point of view based on user needs and insights
Ideate: Conduct an expansive brainstorm to come up with creative solutions
Prototype: Build representations of idea(s) to show to users
Test: Return to original user to test for feedback and iteration
It connects well to Ethnic Studies which involves students taking on social justice research projects, producing analyses and data with results that are actionable.
At a recent teaching
conference in Richmond, Virginia, a session on “design thinking” in education
drew a capacity crowd. Two middle-school teachers demonstrated how they had
used the concept to plan and execute an urban-design project in which students
were asked to develop a hypothetical city or town given factors such as
population, geography, the environment, and financial resources. The teachers in the
audience were enchanted by the details of the project; and if the photographs
in the presentation were any indication, the students who participated in the
lesson enjoyed it, too. The presenting teachers were bubbling over with
enthusiasm for what they saw as the potential inherent in teaching design
thinking. Many of the teachers in
attendance were flummoxed, however. As we filed out of the room and headed
toward our next sessions, I overheard one woman remark to another that while
the urban-design project looked like something she’d like to try in her own
classroom, “I think I missed something. I still don’t understand what design
thinking is. Do you?” The
other teacher shook her head and said, “I think it’s a curriculum, but I’m not
really sure.” Confusion around the
precise definition of design thinking is understandable, said Neil Stevenson, the
executive portfolio director at IDEO Chicago, one of
the best-known purveyors of design thinking. “Design thinking isn’t one thing,”
he told me in a phone interview, “but a bundle of mindsets and philosophies all
wrapped up in one term, which obviously has the potential to lead to ambiguity
and misunderstanding.” While Stevenson spent
plenty of time talking around a definition—explaining mindsets, the nature of
creativity, and the evolution of design—even convincing him to offer a brief
definition proved difficult. Finally, Stevenson outlined what he sees as the
foundational aspects of design thinking as it relates to educators: First, he emphasized,
design thinking starts with empathy. When designing anything meant to be used
by another person—whether that’s a lesson, curriculum, classroom layout, or an
imaginary city—the designer must understand what that person (an “end-user,” in
design lingo) needs. In the case of the urban-design project, for example, the
students can’t just design a pretty building; they must think about the needs
of the people who will live there, as well as the available resources, the
budget, and the impact that building will have on the surrounding landscape.
“The design-thinking philosophy requires the designer to put his or her ego to
the side and seek to meet the unmet needs, both rational and emotional, of the
user,” Stevenson explained. Once the student
designers have gathered all their research together, they must organize and
make sense of it all. Again, in the case of the urban-planning project, after
the students have gathered interviews and research about the needs of their
city’s future residents, students must figure out what to do with all that
information. If, for example, the future residents’ top priorities include
affordability and opulence, the student designer is going to have to find a way
to integrate the residents’ conflicting needs. Finally, design thinking requires
designers to generate ideas—lots of ideas—and prototype them. In order for this
part of the process to work, students and teachers must be comfortable with
failure. For many students, particularly those who want to look smart, this
phase can be frustrating. “People tend to come up with an idea early on, and
know that this idea is it, the perfect idea, and get emotionally invested in
that one thing. Then, when their perfect idea fails, they fall apart,”
Stevenson said. Design thinking forces students to keep their minds open, to
try out lots of ideas early in the process before they let their egos or
emotions get too invested in just one.
There will be a time to
put spitballing aside, of course. Once ideas have been prototyped and tested,
students begin to work toward one effective, final solution—an end product that
can be assessed, presented, displayed, or put to work in their classroom or
community. The beauty of the design process, proponents say, is that the value
of the experience does not lie solely in the end product. Learning happens
throughout the process, from the early research phase to the final
presentation. This allows students and teachers to focus on what’s most
important in learning: the process, rather than the product.One scene from the film
Apollo 13 provides a great illustration of the
design-thinking process. After Apollo 13 is crippled by an explosion, the
astronauts are stranded in the lunar module. The air filters in the lunar module
are failing, so the engineers at NASA must find a way to make a square filter
fit into a round hole using only the materials available to the astronauts. The
engineers find a solution through design thinking: by understanding the needs
and resources of the astronauts, organizing the resources available on the
lunar module, then working together to develop and prototype many ideas. The
ultimate solution may not have been pretty, but it was creative and it was
effective. Their design saved the lives of the Apollo 13 astronauts. This sort of step-by-step, formulaic
approach to creative problem-solving was revolutionary and counterintuitive
when it was first developed in reaction to the launch of Sputnik in 1957. When
Russia leapfrogged ahead of the rest of the world in the space race, the U.S.
needed to respond with a rapid and radical acceleration in technological
innovation. The process of design thinking emerged as an effort to encourage
all scientists—even the least creative, most inflexible thinkers—to be novel,
brave, and innovative in their problem-solving.
Historically,
creativity has been portrayed as a mysterious, elusive force—a gift from the
gods or the muses. Creativity can’t be summoned, the thinking goes, let alone
taught to the mentally inflexible, unimaginative, muse-less masses. Design
thinking upends that perception and assumes that anyone can be a creative
problem-solver.At its best, design
thinking incorporates proven-effective teaching techniques such as
self-directed inquiry and collaborative problem-solving, and dovetails nicely
with social-emotional learning
curricula that emphasize interpersonal skills such as collaboration and
empathy. And the end result of a design-thinking project is often a tangible
product, such as a model city, a robot, or a better mousetrap.
It’s no surprise, then, that many educators are eager to adopt design
thinking as a way to plan their own teaching and as a strategy for helping
their students learn through solving real-world problems. The popularity of design thinking,
however, might be precisely what’s contributing to the confusion I witnessed in
Virginia, says Stevenson:
It’s been extremely
gratifying for all of us practicing design to see the ideas taken on by so many
people. There’s a downside, though, which is that when something becomes
popular, now suddenly everyone wants to learn it and lots and lots of people
will spring up and teach it. For the sake of communication, we tend to define
design thinking as A followed by B followed by C, but in doing this, we are
guilty of oversimplifying.As teachers seek to
learn more about design thinking and its application in their classrooms,
conference sessions and certificate programs have emerged to accommodate
demand. Stanford’s D-School and
IDEO offer two popular
courses, but there are many flavors, colors, and brands of design thinking for
educators to choose from. In other words, the
lack of a clear definition makes explaining, evaluating, and studying design
thinking a challenge. And some teachers at that conference in Virginia—myself
included—were skeptical, and attended the design-thinking session to better
understand whether the concept is actually an effective learning strategy or
simply another education trend gone viral despite scant objective data regarding
its effectiveness for learning. When executed with a
clear understanding of its purpose as a method for fostering empathy,
creativity, and innovation, design thinking can be a powerful tool for learning
and change. If it is hastily and inexpertly implemented by educators with a
weak or incomplete understanding of its principles, however, it is likely to be
a waste of energy and precious classroom time. Design thinking, like Carol Dweck’s
work on fixed and growth mindsets
and Angela Duckworth’s research on grit, are best
understood in context, as a complex and nuanced approach to learning rather
than a checklist of executable tasks. Dweck was so alarmed by the rampant
oversimplification of fixed and growth mindsets that she wrote an article for Edutopia to clear up common
misconceptions about her work. Just as Dweck’s work can’t be conveyed
adequately in a Life Hack infographic,
and Duckworth’s research is apt to be misunderstood when reduced to a listicle, design
thinking seems likely to fail as an educational tool when communicated in terms
of “Five Simple Steps.”
Mindsets, grit, and
design thinking are all victims of their own massive popularity, and in the
rush to incorporate these concepts into existing lesson plans, have sometimes
been reduced to checklist items on teachers’ overcrowded to-do lists. When
treated as a classroom culture, however, rather than an action, design thinking
(as well as mindset and grit) may revolutionize the way teachers and students
think about failure, creative problem-solving, and teamwork.Ultimately, design
thinking is not a curriculum, advocates like Stevenson say, but a process for
problem-solving, a strategy to elicit creativity rooted in empathy and comfort
with failure. Teachers can use design thinking to create a classroom
layout that conforms to the needs of their students, they say, or to plan lessons that will
work best for the students in a given school or classroom. Entire school
districts are embracing design thinking to create spaces and
curricula around the intellectual and emotional
needs of their students. Teachers are also helping students use design
thinking to apply what they’ve learned to real-world problems, such as the
urban-design project described by those middle-school teachers in Virginia. While there is not a
lot of data to support any particular brand of design thinking as an effective
teaching or learning strategy, the key elements of design thinking will be
familiar to any teacher well-versed in the basics of effective teaching: start
with empathy, move ego to the side, and support students in the process of
failing often and early on their way to learning.
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