Week 2: Overview

"Design thinking" is a human-centred design approach that was popularized by IDEO, an international design company. The higher education world began to explore how this design approach could enhance their approaches to curriculum design and development and it is now a recognized alternative to curriculum design. The central focus - understanding the needs of people - is similar to outcomes-based approaches but the process is more open and fluid. Other important aspects of the model are its focus on posing "good" questions, reviewing a wide range of conflicting ideas, innovation, and repeated cycles of testing and improvement (sounds familiar?)

The 5 phases model begins from:

Empathy:  designers take time to reflect on the people that are their audience and purpose. You may find it useful to view a short video about empathy by Brene Brown (see below). Some versions of Design Thinking develop detailed descriptions of learners called  "personas" to guide their designs.

Define:  frame the problem and purpose clearly - why are you doing this?

Ideate:  a guided brainstorming step that seeks to draw out as many ideas as possible. Finding innovative ideas is a goal of this step in the process.

Prototype:  after selecting the main ideas, this step involves "fleshing out" the ideas and providing detailed models or illustrations of how they would work in practice. The purpose is to share the ideas to gather feedback and test the assumptions and beliefs that underly each idea.

Test:  the final step is to test the ideas - build your prototype and try it out on sample audiences or in a real context. Collect responses and ideas for what worked and what didn't - return to the design cycle to integrate what you've learned.

You can explore some examples of how each phase occurred in Using Design Thinking in Higher Education or visit an application of design thinking Rethinking Your Course, in a recent project at University of Guadalajara (UdG), led by Justice Institute's Tannis Morgan.

References

Brown, Brene (2013)

, Youtube video, The RSA channel - https://www.youtube.com/user/theRSAorg

Morris, Holly and Greg Warman (2015) Using Design Thinking in Higher Education, EDUCAUSE Review, Jan. 12, 2015. Retrieved from http://er.educause.edu/articles/2015/1/using-design-thinking-in-higher-education

IDEO's Design Thinking Toolkit for Educators, Retrieved from https://www.ideo.com/us/post/design-thinking-for-educators

Thompson, Gary (2010) Personas, FLUID Project wiki https://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Fluid+Project+Wiki

Stanford's d.school Virtual Crash Course in Design Thinking. Retrieved from http://dschool.stanford.edu/dgift/