Design Thinking- A Friendly Hack

Beyond Bleck

Maybe it's just me but my past experience with Design Thinking has been full of excitement and a quick realization that it needs a LOT of time to understand well enough to use. In a similarly disappointing way, I have recently participated in professional development around "Hacking" as a way to innovate but have been less than impressed by the underlying pettiness and negativity about how wrong everything is. While I wholeheartedly believe in innovation, change and improvement, it is not in my nature to start with the question: What's wrong around here? Luckily, I had a brief encounter with the best of both of these previously "bleck" topics.

d.school’s Virtual Crash Course from Stanford

Once again, Stanford is leading the way. I had heard of the Design School at Stanford before but never realized that they have such an easily accessible Crash Course that makes learning Design Thinking fun. With the simple outline, provided videos and handout page, it is easy to facilitate your own d.school Crash Course.

Basically, our task was to "redesign the gift-giving experience for our partner". We interviewed each other, wrote a problem statement, generated radical alternatives, shared for feedback, refined our idea and built a prototype (all these steps are easily outlined in the handout on their site). It was fun to get to know a new person in the DEEP Learning Conference and really helpful to have someone design a solution for me that I did not even know I was looking for. Now that. . . is hacking! We took something that already existed and made it better. Simple, positive and effective. You know what. . . it was even fun!