Design Thinking

I recently attended the NC-LITe meeting at UNC-Chapel Hill. This meeting occurs twice per year in North Carolina at a rotating location. Meetings focus on Library Instruction and Instructional Technology. If you're interested in the group, the NC-LITe website can be found here. The format of the meetings is normally the same, with campus updates and some kind of active learning or breakouts to get people talking. I was excited to see this time that we were going to undertake an abbreviated Design Thinking workshop. 

This workshop was provided to get participants thinking creatively about an instructional experience, based on Stanford d.school's method. It was facilitated by Jonathan McMichael, UNC-Chapel Hill's Undergraduate Experience Librarian. The worksheet we used can be viewed and downloaded here. (Please note, we only did the first 7 steps to abbreviate the process to fit into the time we had available to us.) The Design Thinking Process works like this:

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

·     McMichael introduced the idea of Design Thinking briefly and asked everyone to think of an instructional problem that they had. The original activity was for people to help come up with a gift for another person.

·     Next, he had three main themes. I believe that they were an in-class issue, a tutorial-related issue, or a technology-related issue. (I honestly cannot remember all of them exactly, but the main point is that this broke the 30+ attendees into 3 big groups.) From those groups, we paired off. I met with an instructional designer from a nearby private university. We introduced ourselves and it turned out we had a number of things in common. 

·     

      McMichael presented more information regarding what we would be doing. Each step would take about 4 minutes each, and we would have to make drawings of possible solutions.

·         The steps were to each do the following:

o    Interview: 4 minute interview to frame the problem we had

o    Dig Deeper: A second 4 minute interview where we were urged to dig deeper and get to the feelings of the person to empathize with them

o    Capture Findings: we independently thought for 3 minutes about the person’s needs and any insights we had about their problem

o    Define a problem statement (3 minutes): Write out a kind of thesis statement of what we were trying to solve. The worksheet follows a specific format.

o    Sketching: for 4 minutes, we drew as many pictures of ideas that we had to fix the person’s problem. Most people drew 3-5 solutions, but one person had 9 drawings.

o    Share: At this point, McMichaels told us to share our ideas, but to do a read on the person’s reactions. He told us not to be nice if we didn't like an idea and not to compliment the person’s drawing skills. Each person had 4 minutes.

o    Reflect & generate a new solution (3 minutes): We got to draw again. This time, we just noted a synthesis of ideas for their problem.

Something that I noticed about this particular workshop was that we did not have enough time to identify our “problem” at the beginning, so neither my partner nor I really had a great problem to work on. Additionally, I think that we should have shared what we thought the problem was before we started sketching because my problem statement had a number of assumptions in it that turned out to be false.

Afterward, McMichael led the entire group in a short reflection of the workshop. The discussion after the design thinking exercise yielded the following insights:

• This process helps you see the problem in a more global context because you have to describe the issue to an outside party.
• It is more organic and fluid because there are multiple solutions; you do not feel like considering any of them is an agreement to act.
• Having to start from wider lens could change how you see what your problem is, because it takes you outside of the problem. 
• One theme we discussed was showing unfinished work to others. This was liberating for some and some found it deeply uncomfortable. We often work with “completed work” as librarians, such as books and tutorials, and we do not want to show unfinished work to others. Some participants expressed that they wished they were more radical in their solutions.
• If honesty hurts, you may be too attached to a certain idea.
• When working on a problem, you can get stuck in one step of the process, and you may not move on. This quick format (4 minutes each step) ensures you don’t get stuck because it moves quickly. 
• The best idea or advice could actually come from you but you have to be outside of yourself to get there.

I can definitely see myself doing this again when I have a specific issue to work on, in order to come up with some fresh solutions and ideas. I think it could even be done over Skype or Google Hangouts with a librarian at another institution (eliminating the two hours of driving). Many people might find the idea of drawing frustrating, but it was fun. I could also see this being a great idea for a staff development day. Another idea that I had for this particular exercise could be for helping students generate ideas for a paper topic in a composition or writing intensive course.