In working through the Discovery Phase of the Design Thinking Process our group started by brainstorming possible topics, with the goal of coming up with lots of ideas. That work led to the creation of a question, a challenge to be faced, to inspire our work. The next step was to identify and define challenges our team might face in coming up with a solution or plan for our identified problem, as well as questions we could ask to lead us to a solution to the challenge. Finally, we identified and defined our audience and end users, and considered what we know and what we don’t know about the end users. This week I contributed to my group’s work a little late because I was out of town for several days, but through the power of Google Docs I was able to connect with the group to see the work in progress and participate in phase 1 when I returned. The google doc starts with a brainstorm of social justice topics which the group used to decide on a design thinking question: How can we ensure all students and staff are a contributing member of a culturally diverse environment? We later revised our question to focus specifically on the culture aspect of a culturally diverse environment, so it now reads: How can we begin to cultivate an environment of mutual understanding that ensures all students and staff are contributing members of a culturally diverse environment? When the question was decided on the group created a list of potential challenges and questions to be answered. For my part I asked for clarification on some of the questions asked, and added some questions of my own to the google doc. I will also be looking to connect with experts, to gather more information that will inform our thinking and planning. The main challenge for our group for this first step was mainly the timing, and being able to connect. Making contact was initially a challenge, and our vacation schedules complicated things and made it difficult for us to collaborate. Also, because our group has not had much experience with virtual meetings, like Google Hang-outs, and some members preferred meeting face-to-face, it was very hard to schedule time together. For me, personally, I was challenged to come up with out-of-the box questions. I’m a very concrete thinker, and the types of questions that seem to be a part of the design thinking process don’t generally come to me readily -- and they didn’t come to me in our group work for this project. I think I will be able to support my group in other ways, but I felt stymied by this step. Next time, I think I would encourage my group to spend more time on the brainstorming and questioning phase (even though that’s my weakness). I think time spent “thinking out loud” is beneficial to getting a large amount of ideas out there to be considered, which can then be narrowed down. I think it definitely would have been helpful to have our full group together in initiating this process, and maybe spending time being clear about what Design Thinking is and seeing it in action would have been beneficial at the start as well. I like the idea of going through this process with students and/or colleagues at my site. I think many students would identify challenges at school adults might not be aware of, and they would be able to come up with unique ideas for confronting those challenges. I think students would be very motivated if they were involved in choosing a challenge and had the opportunity to collaborate with others to identify potential solutions. As for my teaching colleagues, I like the idea of looking at challenges at our site in a collaborative way, and pushing to develop new and unusual ways to deal with them. I think in some ways we’re “stuck,” doing things the way they’ve “always been done,” and this process could help us to look for new and different ideas. |