Group items tagged

bringing human-centered design to education, government, healthcare — the sectors that need it most — requires a few important culture shifts:1. We need to bust out of siloed design practices.2. We need to develop ever-broader capacities, taking an interdisciplinary, deeply collaborative approach.

We turn our own questions on ourselves: What if we could help design education that readies today’s kids for the technologically enhanced (and challenged) environment they’ll grow up into? While we’re at it, what if we could then start addressing the very policy that shapes those educational institutions? That kind of moonshot systems thinking requires both agility and scale — it requires networked organizations and creative collectives. It requires designers who never stand still.

when individuals with their own aspirations and talents come together to build upon each other’s work and drive toward a greater goal, we can gain traction on much bigger challenges — and find new ways forward.

It has felt like a more powerful version of inquiry through it’s focus on developing empathy, students iterating their understanding and then having to use their knowledge rather than just remembering information.

the most comprehensive definition came from a student: Design Thinking is human centred problem solving where designers go through a process which highly values empathy, feedback and multiple iterations in order to create a solution that best suits a user based on their needs and values

The most powerful student comment in this research shows both what students gain from the use of Design Thinking and a thirst for this authentic, meaningful approach to spread further: “I am quicker to find things that don’t feel very meaningful to me which bothers me when I know there can be meaningful ways to learn where even as a high school student I can be contributing to bigger projects that really impact people’s lives.”

“We wanted to shift that culture towards a focus on users’ outcomes,” Hill says.

IBM today published its very own set of design thinking guidelines—a selection of best design practices the company hopes other big businesses will look to as they seek to remain relevant and profitable in a rapidly evolving corporate landscape.

corporate trend in design thinking

We need to look at the world around us and consider what global problems modern society will need our children to solve.

America needs massive change in our understanding of the learning experience, not simply in our exam results.

to change the world, we need a generation of new minds equipped with new ways of thinking.

Design thinking has come a long way since I wrote about it here in 2008. The most valuable company in the world places design at the center of everything it does. Designers are on the founding team of countless disruptive startups. Domains such as healthcare, education, and government have begun to prototype, iterate, and build more nimbly with a human-centered focus. Now that design thinking is everywhere, it’s tempting to simply declare it dead—to ordain something new in its place. It’s a methodology always in pursuit of unforeseen innovation, so reinventing itself might seem like the smart way forward. But in practice, design thinking is a set of tools that can grow old with us.

And I’d argue that in order to create sustained competitive advantage, businesses must be not just practitioners, but masters of the art.

Umpqua