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

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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).

A brief breakdown of the process

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

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

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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.

Understanding and Analyzing the current resources

A chicken or the egg problem. Resources and physical spaces or relationships?

Re-structure the ecosystem:

Top-down approach

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.

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.

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.

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Overcoming Challenges

When people take on the task of solving some problem, especially one that affects the community, there are bound to be challenges.

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