Taught design thinking process course

I taught first year college students studying design and visual media about the design thinking process. My challenge was to create engaging curriculum to adapt to the classes unique format of once a week class (6 hours) over five weeks.

 

“Process is design. Design is process. You are not selling your design, what you sell is the process. ”
— Raghav Iyengar - UX Planet

Role
Adjunct instructor at Seattle Central Community College

Timeframe
2019 - 2021

Goals

  • Give students a real world problems to solve with constraints to simulate real work environment

  • Give students new deliverables to produce each week along with the learning objective

  • Work in small groups

Solution
Following the design thinking principles, I taught students how to formulate, adapt, and use this process. Students worked together in groups of 3 to solve a real problem.

My Impact
Students left my class with the knowledge of how to use and adapt their creative process to meet their users’ needs and be viable for the business.

Developing Course Curriculum

I had five weeks to help students understand the importance of developing a strong creative solving process. I structured my teaching style with short lectures, hands-on activities, and collaborative group work to reinforce learning objectives.

As a jumping off point, I started with college application process to help students understand the concepts being taught.

Course Outline

Week 1: Empathize (Research)
I taught students how to conduct different types of research to understand people’s behaviors and motivations. This helped them gain the empathy.

Deliverables: Research Questions and User Profiles

Week 3: Ideation & Prioritization
With a tangible problem identified, I taught students how to ideate and come up with a lot of possibilities. Then they had to prioritize what can be built.

Deliverables: Ideation technique and Priority Matrix

Week 5: Pitch concept and Tell story
Finally, students were given storytelling tools and had to pitch their ideas showing the process along the way.

Deliverables: Storyboarding and Pitch Deck

Week 2: Define (Synthesis)
I focused on giving students tools to synthesize their findings and go deeper into the journey. This helped them identify a solution based problem for their user.

Deliverables: Problem Identification & Journey Map

Week 4: Prototype & Testing
I structured this week on prototyping fidelity and how to test designs with their users.

Deliverables: Paper Prototype & User Testing

“Real World” Assignment

I gave each group the assignment for the class that they would work on. This worked well until the pandemic happened. I had to re-adapt my course format and the class assignment to be fully remote.

Pre-pandemic - Assignment

The college has just received a grant from an anonymous donor. Although the college has enrollment statistics of their users, they have lost touch with the different user groups of the college and what specifically they need from this school.

  • You will identify a user group within the college, interview them, identify core need/problem(s), and create a solution for this user group.

  • You will pitch your final concept the last week of class to see what group will receive the funding

Pandemic - Assignment

Choose an industry that has been impacted by the pandemic. Help them come up with a way to innovate and still be able to make money during these unprecedented times. How can you help impacted businesses during pandemic make money, stay open, or develop a niche in their industry?

Industry Ideas:

  • Restaurants

  • Bars/Clubs

  • Zoos/Aquariums/Museums/Space Needle

  • Live Music Venue

  • Live Sporting events

Activities to spark collaboration

For each learning objective, I gave students many different way to learn and absorb the content.

  • Students wrote down a big question they wanted an answer too like ‘what is your biggest fear?’ They paired up with a partner and each had to ask smaller questions to draw out the big question. This taught students how to build rapport when conducting research.

  • I collected a variety of service blueprints, customer journey maps, and experience maps and compiled them in one place to view. Students worked in groups to identify themes, commonalities, and differences. Each group picked the map that displayed all of the information best. This gave students hands-on experience in visualizing data.

  • In this exercise, students selected the most important needs for their users’. They put those needs in the form of verbs and added the insight what makes this behavior interesting. This gave students the tools to solve a solution based problem through a few key steps.

Key Takeaways

Learnings

  • Students were resilient to adopting to the remote format and were still able to come up with creative solutions to their real world assignments

  • Teaching is some of the hardest and most rewarding work I have done

Challenges

  • Keeping students engaged in an online class for six hours is hard

  • Five weeks is not enough time to learn everything about design thinking principles and the creative process