Welcome to the Design Thinking Crash Course!
Design Thinking is a process that typically requires days of work. We are going to boil it down to 90 minutes. In this short workshop you will learn some of the basics of Design Thinking and get a feel for what it’s like to work in the flow of Design Thinking.
Workshop Goals
Gain a basic understanding of Design Thinking.
Experience the process by working on a real world problem - your design challenge.
Gain a better understanding of the design challenge.
Get to know your colleagues better.
Discover some possible solutions.
Explore next steps in learning more about Design Thinking.
Instructor / Facilitator
Ken Baldauf
Florida State University, Director, Innovation Hub, CEO, Innovation by Design 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.
Prep & Pre-work
Suggested prep
You will benefit from becoming familiar with Design Thinking prior to the workshop. Take a few minutes to look over the article Design Thinking Comes of Age (Harvard Business Review), and viewing the short video What is Design Thinking? An Overview (AJ & Smart). Check out Ken’s Design Thinking website.
What to expect
Design Thinking is collaborative, empathetic work that is best learned by active doing rather than passive listening. Here are some tips to insure a successful workshop!
Prepare for 90 minutes of non-stop activity and interaction.
You will be working in a team through a sequence of Design Thinking exercises to develop solutions.
The practice requires your undivided attention!
Participate with an open mind ready to empathize with other’s perspectives.
Bring your creative, curious, and imaginative energy. Have fun!
Tentative Agenda
All activities are carried out in small groups using sticky notes.
See www.innovation.fsu.edu/design for a full Design Thinking course curriculum.
This is a 90-minute exercise based on a workshop provided by Stanford dSchool.
(5 minutes) Design Thinking Overview
Design Challenge Reveal (a poignant well known challenge faced by the workforce)
(10 minutes) Pair participants for one-on-one Interviews
(15 minutes) Sense-making Affinity Map - Pair up the Pairs into teams of 4
(5 minutes) Reframe the Problem
(15 minutes) First Burst Affinity Map
(15 minutes) Brand Hack exercise
(5 minute) Solution Selection
(10 minute) Prototype (time allowing)
(10 minute) Solution Pitches
WORKSHOP MATERIAL
The below material will be taught over the course of the 90-minute 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.
Our Design Challenge
Given the tragic and deadly impact of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease) in the US…
How might we raise awareness and support for the victims of ALS to minimize the impact of the disease, reduce the numbers of those impacted, and ultimately eliminate it.
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 - refrain from developing solutions:
Do you know of anyone with ALS? What did you observe?
If not, how about other deadly diseases? How does ALS compare?
Do you think ALS gets the public attention it deserves? Why or why not?
What seems to be the most difficult part of living with ALS?
What seems to be the most difficult part of caring for someone with ALS?
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:
How might we raise awareness and support for the victims of ALS to minimize the impact of the disease, reduce the numbers of those impacted, and ultimately eliminate it.
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.
Other Tools for Ideation
Other tools that are useful in this phase of Design Thinking include:
Brand Hack
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.
Consider which idea has the the potential for the greatest impact and feasibility and begin talk about how it might be implemented in more detail.
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.