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Last week I completed my first design challenge. Working as a team of two, my partner Katia and I employed the five-phase framework of design thinking (Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test) with the strengths of the instructional design ADDIE model (Analyze, Define, Develop, Implement, and Evaluate) and rapid, responsive aspects of the Agile methodology to address online assessment-related concerns currently experienced by educators and students in higher education.
Our team deeply engaged in the design thinking process and had incredible opportunities for collaboration, brainstorming, and learning to innovate something that institutions could use to address their complex challenge. Engaging in such an active approach to learning was the best part of the assignment because learning by doing made the whole experience educational and fun. Two weeks later, I am still wrapping my head around the numerous steps, and activities my partner and I engaged in, as I consider the most surprising thing I learned and the most rewarding part of the process.
Despite being a novice designer, I knew innovation was an essential pursuit for the advancement of humankind. However, once our team embarked on the design challenge, I quickly learned that competently solving design problems is not a gift everyone has. Lucky for me, this was not a concern, because the most surprising thing I learned from the creation process was that design thinking encourages failure, as long as you are willing to try again and do it better.
My partner and I initially saw our design problem and solution as straightforward: students need to be evaluated more appropriately in digital learning environments, so current assessment methods needed to change. However, after engaging further in the process, we began to understand that without a critical instructional approach to our learning design, we risked reducing “the complexity of learning to straightforward methodologies that provide replicable results.” (Morris, 2018, p. 5). We adapted our focus and aimed for maximum inclusion by practicing deep empathy for all those impacted by our design problem (Doorley et al., 2018; Morris, 2018). By rethinking the parameters of our target audience to understand the bigger picture and guide future design decisions appropriately, we expanded our scope to include instructors alongside students as we playfully explored and experimented with new ideas.
From this experience, I learned that to achieve innovation and progress; you need to be willing to get it ‘wrong’ before arriving at the best possible solution that meets the needs of the people you are solving for.
Although the prototype did not come together as sophisticated as my partner and I would have liked, the most rewarding part of the design process was finally seeing our work go from an abstract idea to a physical manifestation. In the end, we identified a more significant problem than we initially set out to solve, leading to a solution around that theory that addressed the needs of those impacted most.
I could have never anticipated the number of steps it would take to bring our solution to life, but I think Tom and David Kelley, Creative Brothers at IDEO, summed it up best when they said, “If a picture is worth 1000 words, a prototype is worth 1000 meetings.”
References
Doorley, S., Holcomb, S., Klebahn, P., Segovia, K., & Utley, J. (2018). Design thinking bootcamp bootleg. Adapted from Hasso-Plattner Institute for Design, Stanford University. Retrieved from dschool.stanford.edu/resources/design-thinking-bootleg
Morris, S. (2018). Critical instructional design. In An Urgency of Teachers. Pressbooks. Retrived from https://criticaldigitalpedagogy.pressbooks.com/chapter/critical-pedagogy-and-learning-online/
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