A rewrite from 2020 in 2024.

For 15 years I've been extolling the virtues of design thinking, where really understanding your users, students, customers - whoever you're designing for - generally takes place first, before you go off to come up with ideas, plans, prototypes and products.

Understand the user, understand their problem. And then you can get designing.

Listen first, empathise, THEN design.

That way, you're not wasting time, energy and effort designing something that people didn't need or want.

But what happens when you can create really good solutions to problems, that work well, and look good, in almost no time at all? Design thinking's 'empathy first' phase makes no sense at all with the tools we have today, that we didn't even have in 2020.

I've come to realise that "design thinking" projects in schools are wading through the treacle of endless discussion, thought papers and workshops where no work is done, all in the name of 'understanding the problem' or 'defining the solution'.

For 15 years I’ve been saying “design thinking isn’t a linear process or repeating cycle”. This is what it means:

You are allowed to read the situation quickly and use your gut, over data.

You're allowed to come to a quick assumption.

You're allowed to prototype something that works, quickly, using an existing platform or AI.

You're allowed to take your flimsy product to real people to gather better feedback on whether you're solving the right problem. In exchange you're giving people people a gift they hadn't expected.

Instead of creating ideas (and killing them early) with the fear that they MIGHT not work, you're now able to create ideas for real, and let them thrive or dive on their own merits.

You're not asking people to imagine your idea (which they never can). You're asking them to use a real thing.

Dewey’s “Learning by Doing” idea of education suggests that the journey of discovery should begin by considering the environment and the nuance of engagement with users to develop a concrete outcome, rather than starting from a more theoretical position.

This idea was reinforced in 1961 in a paper by Kenneth J Arrow of Stanford University for the US Office of Naval Research, titled “The Economic Implications of Learning by Doing” in which he writes:

“It is the very activity of production which gives rise to problems for which favorable responses are selected over time.”

So instead of creating yet another research project, then the plan, why not consider adopting a more agile approach, where creating ideas to realise a vision trumps talking and researching around something that might not even be the right problem to be solving? It's innovative in a sort of sixty-year-old way.

#designthinking #ai #prototyping #research #schools