{"id":432,"date":"2021-01-17T05:45:46","date_gmt":"2021-01-17T13:45:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0160\/?p=432"},"modified":"2021-01-17T05:45:46","modified_gmt":"2021-01-17T13:45:46","slug":"design-thinking-challenge-a-reflection-manifesto","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0160\/design-thinking-challenge-a-reflection-manifesto\/","title":{"rendered":"Design Thinking Challenge: A Reflection & Manifesto"},"content":{"rendered":"

Photo by Andrew Ridley<\/a> on Unsplash<\/a><\/p>\n

Reflecting over the past nine weeks in Innovation, Design, and Learning Environments<\/em> has continuously challenged the status quo of what I came to know in the past and present experiences. In particular, the Design Thinking Challenge Assignment provided me with a meaningful and greater depth of knowledge. Thoring & M\u00fcller (2011) pressed upon design thinking’s effectiveness that it has been widely recognized to solve complex problems and generate innovative solutions. Thus, the Design Thinking Challenge created a crossroad for me between theoretical and experiential learning of d.School (2016). With the attitude of growth and continuous learning mindset, my partner, David, and I persevered through the challenges. We engaged deeply with the design thinking process, brainstormed, and outreached to create a prototype called Open Collaborative Learning (OCL) (Tran & Piechnik, 2021) that we are both proud of. With our cohort community’s valuable feedback, the process became rewarding as I gained transformative insights on how to move forward.<\/p>\n

In the past few years, I have read a significant body of research literature about design thinking through work, yet, never had the opportunity to experience it fully until this course. There was a strong sense of doubt at the beginning stages of the process as I had more questions than answers. However, with David’s prior experience with the design thinking process and expected outputs, it helped us proceed through the steps with more ease. In my experience, Empathy<\/em> was the most challenging and powerful step of the process as it included engaging with those who are impacted by the design solution to providing needed insights. As David and I are both educators and learners, we had to be mindful of our own preconceived biases and beliefs as designers. At some point during conversations, we were able to turn this duality into strength to dig in deeper to find a solution for both learners and educators. Ermezei (2016) echoed the narrative of “design in its very notion has shifted shape; it is no longer designing for people but designing with people, and it points to the state of designing by people.” (2016, para. 5) Moreover, the Define<\/em> step was fascinating and surprising to me. At this step, I gained a deep appreciation and realized the value of the design thinking process. Within our ten-minute interview, we could empathize, infer, and elicit each other’s needs by listening intently and came up with three problem statements for both learners and educators. Thus, designing with the end user’s needs as the centre point of the prototype ensures that the focus of user challenges, insights, and activities (Giacomin, 2014). Our three problem statements:<\/p>\n

Problem Statement #1:<\/em> Learners are at different life stages and intercultural contexts; they do not have an equal level of motivation, communication, and collaborative skills.<\/p>\n

Problem Statement #2:<\/em> Learners need a safe space to learn how to work in a group, foster and nurture their communication and collaborative skills.<\/p>\n

Problem Statement #3:<\/em> Free-riding. Equal grades to group members are not reflective of equal learning or contribution.<\/p>\n

Through making cognitive connections, social connections, and experiential connections (Cross, 1999), David and I arrived at the productive steps of Ideate<\/em> and Prototype<\/em>. Once the problem statements were defined, the ideate process was exhilarating as we came up with “out-of-the-box” ideas that emphasized the “radical” aspect of the collaboration. In my opinion, the Ideate<\/em> step was most crucial to making our prototype a success because it created a safe space for failure as we came up with outlandish, peculiar, and far-out ideas without fear of being judged. Subsequently, it was a surprisingly refreshing, animating, and invigorating process.<\/p>\n

Once the top ideas were gathered, we then prototyped and designed OCL; a prerequisite teamwork course offered to all learners. The most rewarding step of Testing<\/em> began when we presented our solution prototype to our cohort community. We received many praises, constructive feedback, meaningful questions, and ideas for improvement. Aspects that were well-received by our peers were the recognization and acknowledgement that our problem statements spoke to their pain-points and were relevant to their experiences, both as educators and their learners. Many also thought that the solution prototype was well researched and appreciate that OCL is a prerequisite course. Some enjoyed the humour in our Traffic Light of Despair. Moreover, most appreciate the graphics we created with Miro and Canva. Additionally, insightful questions were asked to help us dig deeper to narrow down distinct solutions and resources required, such as:<\/p>\n