Welcome to the Design Thinking Workshop for IT professionals at FSU!
This interactive, beginner-level workshop explores Design Thinking as a practice for addressing human problems through the development of products and services. Design Thinking is an innovation method that requires days to learn and much longer to perfect. This short four-hour session will provide participants with a basic understanding of the methodology by experiencing a few of the tools in a mock simulation.
Instructor / Facilitator
Ken Baldauf
Florida State University, Director, Innovation Hub, CEO, Design Minded LLC, ken@innovation.fsu.edu
Ken Baldauf is the Founding Director of Florida State University’s Innovation Hub, where students from all disciplines work together, utilizing Design Thinking with emerging technologies, to confront the demanding and complex problems of our day. After over 25 years as an FSU faculty member with a background in music and computer science, Ken has pivoted from machine to human, now fostering curiosity, creativity, compassion, and innovation across the disciplines. Through his Innovation by Design class, and through a wide variety of workshops, design sprints, and boot camps, Ken and his team teach and facilitate Design Thinking sessions that win hundreds of new enthusiasts each year. Ken has authored several textbooks, collaborated with Cengage Learning Publishing to create an online learning framework, has presented at educational conferences around the world, and consults with businesses and organizations in order to increase their creative and innovative potential.
Goals
Design Thinking has been embraced by many businesses and organizations as a key method of innovative product development that provides a competitive advantage. The goal of this workshop is to provide ITS professionals with a basic understanding of how Design Thinking can be used in developing and improving technology tools to address user needs. Participants will:
gain a basic understanding of the concepts and tools of Design Thinking,
learn facilitation practices and online tools that support Design Thinking,
develop a deeper sense of community with coworkers,
while exploring a relevant problem and potential solutions.
Prep & Pre-work
Participant Prep
Design Thinking is collaborative, empathetic work that is best learned by active doing rather than passive listening. Here are some ground rules to set expectations and insure a successful workshop!
You will be working in with a team through a sequence of exercises to develop solutions. We ask that participants are fully engaged for the entire duration of the workshop - from beginning to end, to support your team.
Dress as CASUAL as is reasonable within your work environment. We want everyone to be relaxed and comfortable to maximize creativity.
Refueling is useful during long sessions. Have some water and healthy snacks handy and don’t feel self-conscious about eating during the session.
Participate with an open mind ready to empathize with other’s perspectives.
Electronic devices are welcome as tools for research related to the design work you will be engaged in. A break will be provided for checking email and texts.
Pre-work
You will benefit from becoming familiar with Design Thinking prior to the workshop. Take a few minutes to read the article Design Thinking Comes of Age (Harvard Business Review), and viewing the video What is Design Thinking? An Overview (AJ & Smart).
Take the personality test at https://www.16personalities.com/ and make note of your personality type for use in our session.
Set up a free account on Miro at www.miro.com . Miro is virtual whiteboard software. We will be using RingCentral and Miro simultaneously for our group work.
Learn to use Miro by watching the 20-minute tutorial at https://academy.miro.com/courses/getting-started-with-miro. Feel free to create a test whiteboard and play around - zoom in zoom out, pan, try out the tools. We will primarily be using the sticky note tool.
Tentative Agenda
All activities are carried out by small groups using interactive virtual Whiteboards.
See www.innovation.fsu.edu/design for the full course curriculum.
1:00 Welcome & Introductions
1:10 Miro Practice - Personality Miro Board
1:20 Beautiful Questions, HMW, Teamwork
1:40 Empathy Overview
1:45 Ethnographic Research
1:50 One-on-one Interviews
2:05 Sense-making Affinity Map
2:25 BREAK
2:40 Key Insights
2:45 Reframing the Challenge
2:55 Sharing Key Insights and Reframes
3:00 Ideation Overview
3:05 Solutions A-Z
3:15 First Burst Brain Storming
3:35 Brand Hack
3:50 Idea Filtering
4:05 Rapid Prototyping Overview
4:15 Prototyping, Testing and Pitching
4:45 Pitches & Reflection
5:00 CONCLUDE
WORKSHOP MATERIAL
The below material will be taught over the four hour workshop.
Feel free to peek ahead, but do not concern yourself with trying to read or absorb it prior to working through it in our session.
Teams
The Value of a Beautiful Question
Our Design Challenge
In this era of unpredictability and disaster (Natural Disasters, Pandemics, Violence)…
How might FSU IT Services help to insure students maintain maximum accessibility to resources with minimum disruption.
Empathy Tools
Ethnography
Definition: The scientific description of the customs of individual peoples and cultures.
Ethnography Tools: Interviews, Observation, Focus Groups, Desk Research, Surveys
Tools for Planning and Empathy
Other tools that are useful in this phase of Design Thinking include:
Stakeholder Map
Context Map
Empathy Map & Personas
Journey Maps
Check out the full course at www.innovation.fsu.edu/design.
Interview Activity (15 minutes)
Pair up and interview each other regarding your insight, concerns, and feelings about the design challenge topic. For five minutes one person play the part of an ethnographer the other the interviewee, then switch roles for five minutes. TAKE NOTES, gather insights from your subject. Wrap up with five minutes of follow up questions. Each person should collect around 5 - 8 insights.
Example questions:
What are your biggest concerns around potential catastrophes and FSU's emergency preparedness?
What are our biggest challenges and hurdles in supporting students in a crisis?
How is ITS uniquely situated to support students in a crisis.
RESEARCH SENSE-MAKING AFFINITY MAP
Once you've gathered research data through your interviews, research, and empathy map, it's time to make sense of it all. Use Research Sense Making to collect and examine your many pieces of qualitative data and to gain a common understanding about the reality of the customer.
View the Sense-making Affinity Map on your whiteboard.
Each team member claim a work area -use one color for all your sticky notes so it’s easy to trace your work when sticky notes are shared.
Working independently, catalog all of your insights and findings on sticky notes in your workspace, using short phrases (3 - 6 words).
REMEMBER, you are noting insights about the problem, not jumping to solutions.
As a group, share your notes with your team by dragging them into the share space, discussing each sticky note and working to create an Affinity Map. Group and arrange the notes based on their relation to each other.
Post all sticky notes on the whiteboard making them visible to the entire group.
Examine all the sticky notes, asking questions, and explaining your insights.
Rearrange the sticky notes into groups, putting notes that seem to be related together.
Discuss your groupings and come to consensus - the value in all of these exercise is the conversation that is generated!
Label the groups with large sticky notes.
Add artifacts like photos, sketches or diagrams to the Affinity Map if available
Identify patterns and insights and post in a separate space.
The insights and patterns you identify in this final process should inform your problem framing, ideation and the remaining Design Thinking stages.
Select Key Insights
Team members should work independently to identify key insights from within all the insights on your Affinity Map - new knowledge that may hold a key to a solution. Drag Key Insights over to the Top Five frame on your whiteboard.
As a group decide on which are your top five key insights and place them in the list. Please a star in front of the insight that you think is most interesting.
Reframing
Based on your empathy research and the new insights you have gained, rewrite the original HMW to specifically address areas where you feel you can have an impact.
Have each team member work independently to develop a reframed HMW, share them with the group, and determine which your group wishes to use.
Original HMW:
In this era of unpredictability and disaster (natural disasters, pandemics, violence)...
How might FSU IT Services help to insure students maintain maximum accessibility to resources with minimum disruption.
Reframed HMW: How might we…
Ideation Tools
Mental Agility Warmup: Solutions A-Z
Come up with possible solutions to your design challenge utilizing every letter of the alphabet. For example, if you were working on Amazon’s shipping challenge, you might come up with [A]utomated robotic delivery, [B]ulk buying discounts, [C]ustomer pickup locations, [D]rones, etc. As a team, fill out at least one sticky note for each letter within five minutes.
Place stars by the ideas that are most interesting and appealing.
The Brainstorming Mindset
Go for quantity. Ideation is about generating as many ideas as possible, pushing your creativity, and building off one another's ideas. Crazy is encouraged!
Don't Judge. Tap into everyone's creativity by being supportive. What seems unfeasible to you might be part of a great, disruptive concept. Don't shut people down. Instead respond with “yes! and…”
Your sticky note is your voice. Write ideas down with just a few words. Use sticky notes to record your ideas, even if someone else is talking, capture it, and share it!
Be Respectful. Ideation is energizing, and people can get excited. Make room for everyone, encourage introverts to share. Listen attentively and affirm understanding.
First Burst Affinity Map
GET IDEAS OUT OF YOUR HEAD AND INTO THE WORLD!
In this exercise you will use an affinity map as you did in Sense-Making, but here you will use it to share your ideas for solutions rather than your insights.
View the First Burst Affinity Map on your whiteboard.
Each team member claim a work area -use one color for all your sticky notes so it’s easy to trace your work when sticky notes are shared.
Silently, independently, brainstorm, noting all your ideas for SOLUTIONS to your HMW - serious, crazy, and everything in between, on sticky notes in your private work space on the whiteboard.
When you’ve accumulated a significant amount of sticky notes (ideas) share them with the group by dragging them into the Share Space on the Affinity Map.
Group and cluster your ideas as they start to build up on the whiteboard. Label the groupings.
Place stars by the ideas that are most interesting and appealing.
Brand Hack
Your team has been taken over by a prestigious company., develop ideas that fit under your new brand. For example, if you were taken over by Ikea, you might consider ways to flat pack your solution. Disney might provide a solution that was a themed experience, AirBnB might empower the public to provide services needed in order to make some extra cash. The brand logo for your group can be viewed in the Brand Hijack Affinity Map on your whiteboard.
In this case you can skip the independent brainstorming and go right to group collaboration. Feel free to do research online about the brand’s vision, mission, and values.
Place stars by the ideas that are most interesting and appealing.
Other Tools for Ideation
Other tools that are useful in this phase of Design Thinking include:
Think Wrong
Gallery Stroll
Brain Writing
Check out the full course at www.innovation.fsu.edu/design.
Idea Filtering
It’s time to start filtering and selecting which ideas to move forward. In this activity, you begin to combine and narrow your ideas to converge on a solution.
Decide on the very best ideas that were generated through all of the methods above (look for the stars) and pull those sticky notes into the semi-finalist area on your whiteboard for consideration.
Each team member fill out an Idea Card for your favorite solution. There should be at least three unique favs.
Formulate unique descriptive names for each idea.
Draw a priority map on the whiteboard (real or virtual), and as a group, plot each idea card on the priority map (with tape if needed). Discuss each card as it is plotted.
The cards that are closest to the top right corner of the priority map should naturally present themselves as the best ideas. However, if the group is unable to agree on the best idea, utilize the Group Voting box on the idea card to vote for each idea. Each team member should place a hash mark below the emoji that best represents their feelings on each idea. Dot voting might also be considered as a voting mechanism. The ideas with the most smile hash-marks should be seriously considered for moving forward even if it is not the highest on the graph.
This stage concludes with your team selecting the best idea to move forward into prototyping.
Prototyping Tools
Storyboarding
A storyboard is a simple and powerful tool for modeling a persona's experience and selling a solution. Like a comic strip, a storyboard lays out an experience frame-by-frame depicting key moments in the persona's experience capturing details in both pictures and text. Storyboards are ideal for illustrating the implementation of any kind of solution, but are especially useful for solutions that are services such as improving the drive-up dining experience. Storyboarding is a tool that can be useful in any stage of the Design Thinking process. Check out the accompanying illustration, then try out storyboarding for your team!
Other Tools for Prototyping
Other tools that are useful in this phase of Design Thinking include:
Paper Prototyping
Digital Prototyping
3D Modeling
Acting it out
Check out the full course at www.innovation.fsu.edu/design.