Resource:How to engage students in Design Thinking on community challenges?

What is Design Thinking?

Design Thinking is a process by which, through empathy, someone, or much more commonly, some group, observes a moment, recognizes an opportunity to make a change that impacts the world, and delivers on value. In other words it is a powerful tool and mindset for recognizing and understanding problems in our society and then going about solving them.

Importance (Why design thinking?)

Design thinking is often undermined, but its a powerful tool that could be used for problem solving. It could be used to problem solve and cause influential social impact for example: find cheaper alternative technologies for the 3rd world countries in the field of health sciences. Also it could be used to come up with innovative products for an existing company or a product that could eventually have a potential to be a good business (Startups).  

The process

The process of design thinking can be described broken down into a few steps:

1. Empathize
2. Define
3. Analyze  
4. Action:
   1. Ideate : Brainstorm
   2. Prototype: Build
5. Test: Learn about the prototype’s viability
6. Measure progress.

(repeat the above cycle over)
Though the above process may seem linear and chronological. Most of the time, many of the above steps will be happening at once parallely.

Where to start?

Empathizing, identifying and defining problems
Design thinking is a process that teaches people to have humility and humble themselves, leading to the thinking about others. When people place themselves in the shoes of others, they see the world through a different lens, discovering many problems. This empathizing with others, often leads to a burning desire to help, a passion.

Without empathy and a resulting passion, there is no reason in continuing to talk about the process of design thinking. To get students engaged in design thinking in relation to community problems, they must first empathize and internalize a passion. With this passion, it turns out that most physical and structural barriers fade away. People with passions find a way to solve the problem they seek to solve. The question to answer really is then “How to get students to empathize and start the first step to a long often arduous, but fulfilling experience of design thinking?”  The first thing to realize seems to be that in most people, a desire to solve problems is inherent. From the time we are born throughout lifetime, we constantly face problems, surmount some, and get frustrated by others. The reason we do not continue seems to be that we sometimes, get sucked into our own life, and other times, we give up thinking problems bigger than ourselves cannot be solved.
Getting college students, or even better, college students, into groups where they go around their community and learn about not-for-profit organizations, and other resources available can make the students experience the problems people face around them. Interacting with the people who face the problems, and working with them as “Co-designers” rather than through an organization indirectly makes people empathize better. Once a feel for the problem and the manner in which the problem affects society is understood, a passion begins to evolve and the desire to solve a very specific problem emerges almost automatically. At this point, a problem is found and defined.

Understanding and Analyzing the current resources

It is of utmost important to acknowledge the current existing resources on campus and bridge connections between them. From a university or college level standpoint, resources can be divided into three categories.

1. Extracurricular: These are resources available outside the normal curriculum of school or university education, which are generally student driven. Clubs, workshops, hackathons, and TedX shows. These are vital as they enhance collaboration, networking and student engagement. Something like this is almost out of bounds from the general academic curriculums of colleges and universities.
2. Co-Curricular:  This refers to activities, program and learning experiences that complement what students are learning in school as part of the academic curriculum. For example, internships or summer fellowship programs. These resources teach skills, and often give actual experience in design thinking.
3. Curricular: This includes various courses that students can take as a part of their academic curriculum. These courses teach students how to have a design thinking mindset and tackle problems in society.

A chicken or the egg problem

Resources and physical spaces or relationships?
The simple answer seems to be “Build relations! No one is better than all of us together.”
Having resources may seem necessary, but, even with resources, it can be hard to undertake the task of solving complex problems without people to learn from, help and support. So, it is very important to involve stakeholders at different levels like key administrators, faculty, student leaders, local and international organizations, and any other person or group that can and wants to help. These stakeholders will help cause a bigger impact on enhancing student engagement and thus solving the pressing issues they all face.

Re-structure the ecosystem

Top-down approach
To bring in changes it should start from the people who delivers education i.e faculty. Currently there are structural barriers that are not flexible for the faculty to bring in change to the curriculum. These structural barriers includes not teaching courses outside their Programme, publish papers within a set interval etc. To overcome such barriers it has to be re-structured with financial incentives that can drive them towards the goal of inspiring the students.
Faculty should take the design thinking course to understand the importance and then they could design an environment for the students by reducing the course load on students and introduce interdisciplinary programs where they can recognize opportunities and bring in creative solution to problems.

Bottoms-up
The Design Thinking methodology is far from a groundbreaking innovation in problem solving techniques, it is however quite unfamiliar to incumbents within higher education and the management community. Therefore, it is essential to consider a bottoms up approach when attempting to engage students. They are typically more interested in fresh perspectives and strategies. Involving students in the design process will also provide a more clear indication of student body demand regarding community problem solving. Programs such as hack-a-thons, maker meetups, and design competitions can be implemented to attract students to the design thinking space. You should however start small, simple conversation about issues facing the community may yield a bounty of unique ideas and perspectives. This can be as simple as getting a small group together over coffee on campus. You can utilize the small scale interactions for recruitment in order to bring passionate students into the fold, further increasing the likelihood of success when implementing your overarching student engagement strategy.  

Time for Action (Activities)

Once the problem has been identified and defined, relationships made, networks built, and the resources available analyzed, it becomes time to take action. Using the resources available and connecting with people to brainstorm on possible solutions seems to be the first thing to do. Hackathons, TedX events and simple meetings can be used to exchange ideas, work on a possible solution and talk through other plausible solutions. Workshops and seminars can be used to understand some tools that can be used in problem solving.
Once a solution is agreed upon, comes the part where you use all the things you have learned in your lifetime, building a prototype. Here too, students must connect with others, use resources available and go about making a product realizing that this is a prototype and things can be improved.
Now that you’ve done your research, identified and acquired essential resources and relationships, and designed a prototype level strategy it’s time to take further action. All of your planning efforts are useless without testing them out in the real world. Testing should be done as soon as possible allowing you to fail fast, identify and correct flaws, and quickly bring a fresh iteration of your strategy into play. By practicing this methodology you can increase validated learning and overall impactfulness of your strategy.

Measure

All of the work done thus far provides little benefit without an understanding of it’s impact on our target segments; the community and the university. It is essential that feedback is collected throughout the design process and post implementation. The data collected will allow conclusions to be drawn regarding the effectiveness of your design as well as provide a raw guide to reference if a pivot in strategy becomes necessary. The key here is not to forget to utilize the design thinking methods to develop your design thinking implementation strategy; they are universal in nature and increase chances of a successful adoption of strategy.

Overcoming Challenges

When people take on the task of solving some problem, especially one that affects the community, there are bound to be challenges; overcoming incumbents, organizational inertia, and lack of student and community demand just to name a few. While these challenges are certainly no small feat they are by no means insurmountable! The key is to build strong relationships with university faculty, students, administrators, and your community. By establishing trust and rapport with these key contacts it may be possible to leverage their network and resources to help you overcome more complex and difficult challenges. Try to tune your vocabulary to match that of your audience, the delivery of your message will be better received and more likely to compel action. Consider the course loads of the students and faculty you’re communicating with. Attempt to map your engagement strategy around their convenience the best you can so you may maximize its adoption. It may be difficult for students to pursue interests outside their course of study as well as for faculty to become involved when their schedule is overwhelming. A merit and compensation system may drive faculty interest in your engagement strategy but will take some work to roll out.