How we teach Design Thinking
Design Thinking and Innovation modules by Robert O'Toole & Bo Kelestyn
A blend of pedagogic strategies and interdisciplinary methods, wrapped in a lifeling learning pedagogy with an emphasis on students co-creating transformative journeys that fit with their experience, interests and long-term life goals. We co-teach a 2nd/3rd/4th year version with 30 students from across the University (IATL), and a postgrad version for the Humanitarian Engineering MSc. This approach is also used in our own related modules, taught in Chemistry (Bo) and the Arts Faculty (Robert). We can teach this entirely online, however it works best as a blend of online and on-campus sessions, with field trips. Key concepts and techniques are covered in short online videos and readings. Most of the learning takes place in workshops, individual study, and group projects.
1. Our aims & philosophy
All honest teaching is "ethical" - beginning with a vision of what a good person, and the community and environment in which they live, is like; how that imagined good person flourishes in that world, and in return sustains and enhances it. That vision is not arbitrary, but rather is founded on reasons.
Virtue-led designing for a fairer sustainable world
Our vision emerges from an interdisciplinary and inter-profession movement called participatory Design Thinking. It works towards equipping communities with the capabilities and powers they need to effectively design their own practices, environments, tools, and systems, for fairer, more sustainable, and more inclusive ways of living. Decolonizing design is at the heart of this, along with design for wellbeing, inclusivity, social development, and gender equality. Our approach to teaching and assessing is constructively aligned with these virtues.
Students becoming designerly change agents
The goal for our students is to become "designerly change agents", applying what they learn to real-world challenges, but also facilitating communities in developing and applying their own design capabilities.
Students redefining change agency
However, this vision is neither unchanging nor complete. Students have the right, and perhaps a responsibility, to refine, or even re-envision, the idea of goodness towards which we teach. It's their futures that we have imagined, not ours. There is then a need to design teaching as open to dialogue and creativity, respecting the rights of the students to define goals and futures, but at the same time ensuring learning is achievable and robust. Attaining that balance is a shared responsibility. A compact between the generations. An ethical agreement.
Our second goal is, therefore, for our students to actively develop what it means to be a "designerly change agent".
2. Content & activities
We introduce our students to successful design thinkers from a range of fields. This includes online and on-campus sessions led by experts. Highly Sprung Performance lead a physical theatre workshop, exploring physical space, movement, risk and multisensory designs. Limina Immersive tell the story of their innovative work in VR experience design and research, connecting Design Thinking with creative-digital enterprise. In 2021 South African social innovation design practitioner and researcher Keneilwe Munyai led a workshop on designing with communities in Africa.
We explore concepts, tools, and techniques from design research and related fields (psychology, anthropology, writing, art, film making, business, and engineering), through online learning and in-class practice (on campus and/or in Teams). Each workshop starts with a "reflective jam" in which we share what we have learned and ideas for applying learning.
We undertake design studies of real-world design and dilemas, of various types, scales, and complexity, beginning with familair designs, and building up in scale and complexity. This includes field trips (e.g.to the Herbert Gallery and Museum) during which we observe designs in action and interact with users. We also spend time playing with technologies, learning how to explore their usefulness and limiations (e.g. VR headsets).
Students tackle a series of design challenges, realistic and worthwhile, requiring sustained iterative exploration and creativity, leading up to a major group challenge. Documented in a multimedia portfolio and videos. The challenges and design studies are introduced over the full length of the module, and students encouraged to draft responses early, so that we can provide feedback and students can experiment with alternative responses.
Each student synthesises this into a reflective essay written from their perspective, connected in with their home discipline, and fitting Design Thinking into their future plans and ambitions.
3. Pedagogic strategies
Lifelong learning: this is fundamentally a lifelong learning approach. Right from the outset we want the students to think about how what they do in the module will be of use to them, and others, in the future. We also want them to use what they have already learned, in academic work, in arts, sport and other activities, in the workplace, and in life. Portfolios and the reflective essay are classic lifelong learning technqiues.
Case-based learning: we critically examine real cases, real designs, applying concepts to understand their details and the stories behind their creation, application, and how they have changed over time. This raises many significant questions about how the world is designed and whose interests it serves.
Location-based learning: we study designs in their physical and social contexts, as well as the design of social spaces and practices. Field trips, organised by us or by the students themselves, are essential to this. We accompany students, modelling design anthropology methods, and supporting them in trying them out for themselves.
Inquiry-based learning: students conduct their own design studies, exploring their chosen topic and the aspects that matter to them. Each student diverges, building and sharing a story enriched with a broad range of observations and knowledge drawn from many different academic, professional and personal sources.
Problem-based learning: as their confidence and knowledge increases, the emphasis shifts to problematic design challenges and the creation of solutions. Students are encouraged to identify problems themselves, create a brief, and explore diverse solutions.
Public pedagogy: the final group design challenge is to design a project for and with the public. Students identify their target audience. A good response is one that involves people in the design process. An excellent response is one that develops design capabilities amongst other communities.
4. Assessment strategies
Each student submits a multimedia portfolio of design studies and a reflective essay.
A design study is a description and critical analysis of a design-in-action and as-experienced by real people. The word count for these is deliberately low, forcing the students to use images, video, and audio, as well as presentationial structure to tell the story of the design. Key design concepts and techniques must be applied precisely and with effect to achieve higher grades. However, this should not be jargon-heavy. Design studies are intended for a general audience. This is an authentic form of assessment, being the kind of analysis and storytelling that design professionals have to do. Our visiting speakers demonstrate the value of these techniques in real-world collaborative design projects.
The reflective essay situates learning within the experiences, values, and ambitions of the individual students. Research has demonstrated how successful innovators are able to articulate a joined-up and engaging story linking together their experiences, their work, their values and their goals. This adds a further dimension of authenticity.
This can be quite challenging for our students, who are not based in disciplines where this kind of assessment is normal. We have to carefully scaffold and support them to understand and master the approach. We use a low-stakes assessment strategy. Students start working on design challenges and studies in week 1, with feedback being given early and often. We use a notebook system that gives us access to the students developing work. We offer individual support through Teams chat and ad hoc meetings as required.
After week 10 the students have at least a month to continue working on their design studies and reflective essay. We offer individual and group meetings in Teams during this period.
Students are encouraged to share their design study responses in the "reflective jam" at the start of each workshop, and with each other for peer support. The final challenge is undertaken in small groups in Teams. In the postgrad versions each team produces an assessed video presenting their ideas (this may in the future be added to the undergrad version). Each group member presents their own personal view on the challenge and their group's solution as a design study. Collusion is encouraged, to be authentic to real-world design teams. We also encourage collaboration between groups.
5. Challenges, solutions & future plans
This is a highly dialogical module, in which students are encouraged to take the lead, start conversations, ask questions, and share examples. Keeping all of that activity together and well organised in one easily accessible place is a challenge. Learning is continuous, as students apply concepts and techniques, and develop their understanding outside of sheduled sessions. The aim is for Design Thinking to become part of their everyday lives. We use Microsoft Teams team spaces as the medium for these dialogues and collaborations. We have whole-class channels, and private channels for each of the groups (although they can open them to others if they wish). Students collaborate on documents in their channels, and organise their own meetings - just as they would in real-world projects.
We need to be able to help individuals efficiently and quickly. Teams private chat is used for individual support. At the start of the module, we iitiate a chat with each student and the two teachers. The student may ask questions or request feedback through this private channel. As most requests are simple, we respond quickly through text. Sometimes we organise video meetings for longer discussions.
The widespread adoption of videoconferencing has made it easier for us to bring more real-world experts into our sessions, for whole workshops or for short sections.
Alongside Teams, in live sessions and asynchronously, we use a range of other tools for collaboration. Padlet has proved popular for quickly sharing ideas. Vevox Q&A is used to crowdsource ideas and suggestions for workshop topics. Vevox surveys are used to gather more structured feedeback. In 2021 we introduced the Miro collaborative whiteboard. This was developed for design consultancy prodfessionals, but also works brilliantly in teaching. We can create frameworks and templates in which we work as a whole class, or in breakouts - online, on-campus, or hybrid. We can add text, diagrams (including all of the widely used diagram types in design, innovation, management, and engineering), video, web pages, annotations and much more. Many students adopted this for their own work.
Our use of multimedia portfolios also requires more advanced technologies. The portfolios must support easy, fluid, construction of pages using different media. At first we tried Mahara, but this was too clunky. OneNote, with its Microsoft Teams integration, has worked well over the last couple of years. We create our Teams space as a Class-type team. This auto-generates a OneNote notebook structure, with notebooks for each student. Teachers have access to the notebooks. We can also distriubute templates to the students for them to complete each design study. They submit these through Teams. This works well in allowing us to provide continuous feedback. The majority of our students already use OneNote, and others learn it quickly. We provide intro materials on how to use the tools.
We are now considering moving from OneNote to Miro, as it is much a better and more fluid notebook tool. Students will be able to submit their Miro based work as PDFs to Tabula. This would simplify the submission and marking workflow. We could also get groups to embed their group videos into a Miro notebook, along with their personal design study response to the group challenge.