Reflection Papers
You will complete 4 papers that assess your comprehension of key concepts presented in the readings, activities, and team design project. Each paper is evaluated at 10% of the overall 40%. Detailed instructions for each paper will be provided in Canvas.
Congratulations, you just completed one of the paths to explore your project: Explore Humans. Reflect on and analyze the work you and your team did these past 3 weeks by writing an APA format, 2-5 page paper using the framework: What? So What? Now What? This is an individual assignment and each of you will need to write and submit your own reflections to the prompts below.
online-course-icons_icon-info.png Assignment Requirements
For each, be concrete and specific and consider the tools, concepts, and mindsets you used, capturing details of how you individually contributed and how you collaborated with your team to achieve the weekly goals.
What? Describe the work you did to explore your project these past 3 weeks.
Describe what you learned about your project during this path.
Describe how you felt and what you were thinking while exploring this path.
What did you observe and notice about yourself? What did you observe and notice about your team?
So What? Evaluate the work you did to explore your project these past 3 weeks.
What concepts, tools, methods, or mindsets led to insights about your project? What didn’t lead to insights about your project? Provide evidence for both.
Considering what you learned exploring this path, what does this mean for your project? For the people impacted by your project? For you? For your team?
Why does your project exploration these past 3 weeks matter?
Now what? Explain the next steps based on the work you did to explore your project these past 3 weeks.
How does this experience validate or challenge your understanding of the project? The people impacted by your project? Yourself? Your team?
How might you use some of the concepts, tools, methods, or mindsets from this path in your life (school, work, or otherwise)?
What new questions do you have about your project after exploring this path?
Frame the Project Space
People often think that innovation strikes like lightning. Some people are lucky and good ideas come to them while most others aren’t. People also think that if you focus hard enough, you’ll come up with a life changing idea. That’s not typically how innovation works. Design thinking is a process that leads to innovation and it starts with identifying a need people have. If you can solve a problem that people experience and can solve it well, that’s innovation. That’s something that people will pay attention to and want.
In this module, you will scope your design project by starting with a topic your team thinks would benefit from being redesigned. You’ll delve deeper into this problem space with a human-centered approach where your team will consider who might be impacted and what needs they have. You’ll use that information to scope your team’s design thinking project. You will also continue to build on your team dynamics by learning what constructive feedback is and how to share it with others.
online-course-icons_icon-learning objectives.png Learning Objectives
At the conclusion of this module, you will be able to:
Explore who may be impacted and who may benefit from a design thinking project.
Scope a design thinking project.
Provide constructive feedback to your team using the “I like, I wish, What if” framework.
online-course-icons_icon-group project.png Project Teamwork
Create a copy of your team’s design studio.
TEAM GOAL // Scope your team project.
Level 3 Teams: Complete the Team Design Studio Module 3 prompts as a team during your weekly team meeting.
Level 4 Teams: Each team member will follow the Team Design Studio Module 3 prompts. If another team member has already worked on a prompt, review their work and build on it. Continue to the next prompt until your team reaches the weekly goal. Working in this manner does not mean that the first person to contribute does all of the work. You’re taking steps as a team to reach your weekly goal, like a relay race, where you “pass the baton” from one person to the next to reach the finish line.
Provide constructive feedback to your team using the “I like, I wish, What if” framework.
Decide how you want to start exploring your project: people, possibilities, or solution
We want to learn more about the people impacted -> start at Explore Humans: Module 4.
We want to explore the possibilities for this project -> Start at Explore the Possibilities: Module 7.
We have a solution in mind for how to solve our problem and want to explore it -> Start at Explore a Solution:
Human-Centered Design
Design thinking is human-centered design, where you focus on the needs of a specific person and come up with innovative ways to meet their needs. You will spend the semester learning design thinking in an interactive, team-based way by applying it to a team project. Before jumping in, you first need to understand what human-centered design is.
Watch this video:
https://www.designkit.org/human-centered-design
Setting up Your Team Design Studio
Every designer needs a space to work. Your team will work in a digital design studio. Each team will have their own studio where you’ll complete the work for your design project.
The Team Design Studio is a Google Slide Deck that provides step-by-step instructions for each week of your design project. To get started, have one person from your team make a copy of the Team Design Studio and change the share setting so that the Studio is shared with everyone on the team and the course instructor.
Click here (Links to an external site.) to view the Team Design Studio document.
Click here (Links to an external site.) to automatically make a copy of the Team Design Studio document.
Remember, each team only needs ONE copy of the Team Design Studio. You will all collaborate within the same Team Design Studio.
Team Design Studio Work
At the beginning of this course, you formed teams based on a “new normal” your team wants to reimagine. Your team goal for this week is to scope your team project. This involves considering who might benefit or be impacted by redesigning your team’s new normal (remember, this is human-centered design!).
To reach your team’s goal of scoping your team project, you will work in your Team Design Studio to:
Explore who might benefit and be impacted the most by redesigning your team’s “new normal” topic.
Narrow down on who you want to design for by voting.
Finalize your project scope.
Find the corresponding slide for Module 3: Frame the Project Scope in your Team Design Studio. Collaborate with your team using the distributed working model agreed upon by your team:
Level 3 Teams: Complete the Team Design Studio Module 3 prompts as a team during your weekly team meeting.
Level 4 Teams: Each team member will follow the Team Design Studio Module 3 prompts. If another team member has already worked on a prompt, review their work and build upon it. Continue to the next prompt until your team reaches the weekly goal. Working in this manner does not mean that the first person to contribute does all of the work. You’re taking steps as a team to reach your weekly goal, like a relay race, where you “pass the baton” from one person to the next to reach the finish line.
Read
Working on a team can be challenging, especially if teams lack the ability to communicate effectively. Constructive feedback, which is feedback that is specific, based on observations, and comes from a place of care, can be helpful for teams to open up the lines of communication. One framework for providing constructive feedback is in the form of “I like…” and “I wish…”. Learn more about this concept and then practice giving constructive feedback using this framework to your team. There is a space in Module 3 of your Team Design Studio to provide constructive feedback.
d.school. (2018). Bootleg Deck. Click here (link opens in a new browser window) (Links to an external site.) to access the I like, I wish, What if method card from the d.school Bootleg Deck. (Optional: Click here to (link opens in a new browser window) (Links to an external site.) to access the entire d.school Bootleg Deck.)
End of Module
Congratulations, you have completed Module 3. As a team, it is now time to decide how you want to start exploring your project: through people, possibilities, or a solution. Your team will experience all three paths by the end of the semester. Start by picking the path your team is most excited about or intrigued by:
We want to learn more about the people impacted -> Start at Explore Humans: Module 4.
We want to explore the possibilities for this project -> Start at Explore the Possibilities: Module 7.
We have a solution in mind for how to solve our problem and want to explore it -> Start at Explore a Solution: Module 10.
Explore Humans // Exploring Empathy and Needs
You are beginning the Explore Humans path for your team design project. This path will take 3 weeks to complete. You’ll work with your team in your Team Design Studio to complete the weekly design project goals. You’ll also have individual assignments due each week: discussion prompts due the first two weeks of this path and a reflection paper due in the third week of this path.
Design thinking is human-centered design, where you look at the needs and pain points people have and find creative solutions to solve those. As designers, it’s easy to make assumptions about the needs of others, which is often done. Google Glass, for example, was hyped as a revolutionary technology and failed because of a lack of clarity of purpose and user need.
Empathy, typically defined as experiencing the world through someone else’s eyes, is a way to combat those assumptions and preconceived notions about a problem and instead learn first-hand about another person’s experience. With design thinking, empathy is used to provide further clarity on the problem and need for which you’re solving. But is empathy an end-all-be-all solution for innovative design? What might be the limitations of empathy? How might empathy be impacted by ethics? In this module, you’ll explore empathy-gaining techniques and use them for your design project while also evaluating the impact of empathy and ethics.
Important Note: Your team will be required to interview people next week who are similar to the personas your team creates this week. To help you prepare, this week your team will brainstorm potential people to interview. The following week your team will create an interview guide as well as set up and conduct the empathy interviews. Each team member must play an active role in an empathy interview, either as the interviewer or a notetaker. Let your instructor know if you’re having trouble identifying people to interview.
online-course-icons_icon-learning objectives.png Learning Objectives
At the conclusion of this module, you will be able to:
Describe what empathy is.
Explain the role of empathy in a design thinking project.
Create a persona for a design thinking project.
Explore assumptions and unknown variables for a project.
online-course-icons_icon-group project.png Project Teamwork
TEAM GOAL // Create a persona
Level 3 Teams: Complete the Team Design Studio Explore humans: Week 1 prompts as a team during your weekly team meeting.
Level 4 Teams: Each team member will follow the Team Design Studio Explore humans: Week 1 prompts. If another team member has already worked on a prompt, review their work and build on it. Continue to the next prompt until your team reaches the weekly goal. Working in this manner does not mean that the first person to contribute does all of the work. You’re taking steps as a team to reach your weekly goal, like a relay race, where you “pass the baton” from one person to the next to reach the finish line.
What is Empathy?
Empathy is a key component of human-centered design, which ultimately focuses on understanding the needs or people and designing innovative solutions to address them. What is empathy exactly and how is it different from sympathy?
online-course-icons_icon-video.png
he Role of Empathy
You’ve learned the difference between empathy and sympathy. What role might empathy play in design thinking work? What might be the role of empathy in entrepreneurship and coming up with new ideas? What relationship does empathy have with ethics especially considering power dynamics and blindspots and biases that might be at play? Explore these questions through the materials below.
online-course-icons_icon-read.png Read
Vandendriessche, M. (2012). The Story Of Playpumps: Merry-go-rounds, water, and failures in development aid.
The Story of PlayPumps: Merry-go-rounds, Water, and Failures in Development Aid
LISTEN:
https://www.npr.org/2020/03/06/812864654/the-limits-of-empathy
Team Design Studio Work
Your team goal for this week is to create a persona. This involves empathy and trying to understand who’s needs you’re solving for with your design project.
To reach your team’s goal of creating a persona, you will work in your Team Design Studio to:
Understand of who you’re designing for.
Sketch a persona.
Question assumptions you have about who you’re designing for.
Identify potential interviewees.
Find the corresponding slides for Explore Humans: Week 1 – Exploring Empathy and Needs in your Team’s Design Studio. Collaborate with your team using the distributed working model agreed upon by your team:
Level 3 Teams: Complete the Team Design Studio Module 3 prompts as a team during your weekly team meeting.
Level 4 Teams: Each team member will follow the Team Design Studio Module 3 prompts. If another team member has already worked on a prompt, review their work and build upon it. Continue to the next prompt until your team reaches the weekly goal. Working in this manner does not mean that the first person to contribute does all of the work. You’re taking steps as a team to reach your weekly goal, like a relay race, where you “pass the baton” from one person to the next to reach the finish line.
End of Module
Congratulations, you have completed Week 1 of the Explore Humans path where you created a persona for your design project. Please proceed to Explore Humans Week 2: Practice Empathy. At the conclusion of the next module you will be able to:
Use empathy methods to explore your design thinking project.
Apply mindsets for effective empathy interviews: a beginner’s mindset, active listening, and being curious.
Create an empathy interview guide and plan.
Explore humans // Practice Empathy
There’s value in understanding someone else’s perspective. But when you’re designing for someone else’s need, it’s necessary to go beyond understanding. Oftentimes, a first-hand perspective of someone else’s experience is the only way to truly understand the nuances of the need or problem you’re trying to solve.
How might you gain a first-hand perspective in solving your team’s design problem? One way is by doing empathy interviews. In this module, you’ll learn what an empathy interview is and how it differs from other types of interviews, you’ll interactively try out mindsets that are conducive to empathy interviews, and you’ll prepare for and conduct an empathy interview with someone similar to your team’s persona.
Important Note: Last week you brainstormed potential interview candidates (i.e. people similar to your persona) for your upcoming empathy interviews. This week your team will conduct empathy interviews as a way to learn more about the experiences of others as they relate to your project scope.
Every teammate is responsible for conducting an empathy interview, either as the interviewer or the notetaker. This involves the following considerations:
Scheduling an empathy interview this week with someone outside of your team at a time when two teammates are available.
The interviewer will use the interview guide your team is developing this week as a loose framework when conducting the interview.
The notetaker will take notes during the interview to capture what the interviewee says, including quotes and other interesting pieces of information.
Let your instructor know if you’re having trouble with scheduling your interviews this week.
online-course-icons_icon-learning objectives.png Learning Objectives
At the conclusion of this module, you will be able to:
Use empathy methods to explore your design thinking project.
Apply mindsets for effective empathy interviews: a beginner’s mindset, active listening, and being curious.
Create an empathy interview guide and plan.
online-course-icons_icon-group project.png Project Teamwork
TEAM GOAL // Create an interview guide
Level 3 Teams: Complete the Team Design Studio Explore humans: Week 2 prompts as a team during your weekly team meeting.
Level 4 Teams: Each team member will follow the Team Design Studio Explore humans: Week 2 prompts. If another team member has already worked on a prompt, review their work and build on it. Continue to the next prompt until your team reaches the weekly goal. Working in this manner does not mean that the first person to contribute does all of the work. You’re taking steps as a team to reach your weekly goal, like a relay race, where you “pass the baton” from one person to the next to reach the finish line.
Gaining Another Perspective
Your persona is just that, a persona. Take the next step in learning more about them and the problem you’re trying to solve by practicing empathy as a way to better understand someone else’s world and perspectives.
Watch Video:
https://www.designkit.org/mindsets/4
Mindsets for Empathy
At the beginning of the course, you were introduced to different mindsets that are conducive to design thinking. One of those mindsets was a beginner’s mindset, where you set your experiences aside and observe the world as a beginner would. Other mindsets that are helpful specifically when gaining empathy are active listening (being in the moment and focused on what someone else is saying), and being curious (asking why and digging for stories when trying to learn from someone else).
You’ll be conducting an empathy interview (a.k.a. interviewing someone related to your team’s design project) as a way to learn more about your project. To help practice the above mindsets, you’ll do an activity that will put you in the role of a beginner and you’ll read about a questioning technique mimics being curious.
READ:
https://www.designkit.org/methods/the-five-whys
DO:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1pRrvz5AdedYGJ8hkGZJ5UWWneIy9mMaunONv3yrHY0w/edit#slide=id.p
Team Design Studio Work
Your team goal for this week is to create an interview guide. This involves creating a framework of questions you’ll use as a guide when conducting your empathy interviews.
To reach your team’s goal of creating an interview guide, you will work in your Team Design Studio to:
Schedule empathy interviews
Brainstorm and refine questions
Finalize your interview guide by adding questions that elicit stories
Find the corresponding slides for Explore Humans: Week 2 – Practice Empathy in your Team’s Design Studio. Collaborate with your team using the distributed working model agreed upon by your team:
Level 3 Teams: Complete the Team Design Studio Module 3 prompts as a team during your weekly team meeting.
Level 4 Teams: Each team member will follow the Team Design Studio Module 3 prompts. If another team member has already worked on a prompt, review their work and build upon it. Continue to the next prompt until your team reaches the weekly goal. Working in this manner does not mean that the first person to contribute does all of the work. You’re taking steps as a team to reach your weekly goal, like a relay race, where you “pass the baton” from one person to the next to reach the finish line.
Challenging and easy part of implementing the concept
When implementing the concept of empathy that we learned this week, it was challenging to develop questions that did not make the interviewee feel like we were prying into their business. It wasn’t easy to develop questions that enabled them to respond without giving too much personal information. The easy part in implementing this concept was that we could relate to most of the responses that were given.
Use of the concept in other areas of life
An individual can use empathy in their daily life to understand the feelings of others and ways through which they can respond appropriately to them. That will enable them to build strong social relations with their schoolmates, workmates, family, and friends (Howe, 2017).
Role of the concept in entrepreneurship and development of ideas
In entrepreneurship, empathy plays a role that enables a company to develop products and services that are beneficial and functional for their customers. Listening and understanding the problems needs of the people a company or person is meant to serve makes it easier to come up with solutions to their problems (“Why empathy is the most important business skill,” 2020).
Ethical implications
Since empathy involves sharing one’s feelings with another, there is no guaranteed confidentiality of the information shared. The interviewer could easily decide to share the information with any person. The person sharing the information can be easily manipulated by the one extending empathy towards them.
End of Module
Congratulations, you have completed Week 2 of the Explore Humans path where you created an interview guide and used it to interview someone related to your team’s project scope. Please proceed to Explore Humans Week 3: Interpreting Empathy Data. At the conclusion of the next module you will be able to:
Use design thinking data capture to process empathy interview data.
Narrow the scope of your project using design thinking define tools.
Create a point-of-view statement from empathy interview data.
Provide constructive feedback to your team using the “I like, I wish” framework.
Explore Humans // Interpreting Empathy Data
Data comes in all shapes and sizes. Oftentimes quantitative data, which is measured using numbers, is used for making decisions, for example: the number of people impacted, return on investment, number of responses received. When trying to learn more about a problem, there’s a tendency towards surveys to get a large number of responses and in turn, a large data set. Design thinking, however, mainly relies on qualitative data, which is non-numerical and is observed but not easily measured. The qualitative data in design thinking comes from empathy interviews.
Consider a survey question to understand if consumers will use a product. What information is gained by receiving a response of, “Yes, I’ll use this product”? A simple yes, no, or maybe response gives a surface level understanding but does not delve into the nuance of what circumstances have to align for someone to actually use the product. Now consider doing an empathy interview where you can talk with someone at length to understand what they mean when they say, “Yes, I’ll use this product.” What are the benefits and drawbacks of qualitative vs. quantitative data? How might you leverage both to get a fuller picture of a problem you’re exploring?
You’ll delve into how to interpret qualitative data, pulling it apart and piecing it back together to look for themes, patterns, and contradictions, all with the goal of making meaning from your empathy interviews. You will also have a chance to provide constructive feedback to your team about your collaboration and progress on the design thinking project.
online-course-icons_icon-learning objectives.png Learning Objectives
At the conclusion of this module, you will be able to:
Use design thinking data capture to process empathy interview data.
Narrow the scope of your project using design thinking define tools.
Create a point-of-view statement from empathy interview data.
Provide constructive feedback to your team using the “I like, I wish” framework.
online-course-icons_icon-group project.png Project Teamwork
TEAM GOAL // Create a “point of view”
Level 3 Teams: Complete the Team Design Studio Explore humans: Week 3 prompts as a team during your weekly team meeting.
Level 4 Teams: Each team member will follow the Team Design Studio Explore humans: Week 3 prompts. If another team member has already worked on a prompt, review their work and build on it. Continue to the next prompt until your team reaches the weekly goal. Working in this manner does not mean that the first person to contribute does all of the work. You’re taking steps as a team to reach your weekly goal, like a relay race, where you “pass the baton” from one person to the next to reach the finish line.
Provide constructive feedback to your team using the “I like, I wish, What if” framework.
Decide how you want to explore your project next: possibilities, or solution.
We want to explore the possibilities for this project -> Go to Explore the Possibilities: Module 7.
We have a solution in mind for how to solve our problem and want to explore it -> Go to Explore a Solution: Module 10.
Unpacking Interview Data
You completed your empathy interviews and have notes from those interviews. Learn what to do with interview data to help your team uncover insights as well as identify patterns and themes related to your project scope by unpacking your data to make it visual and creating empathy maps. As you map out your team’s data, look for patterns, contradictions, and themes.
https://www.ibm.com/design/thinking/page/toolkit/activity/empathy-map
Read
Once you unpack and analyze your interview data, the next step is to create a point of view statement based on the patterns and themes that emerged from your analysis. Learn how to create a point of view statement.
Read
Once you unpack and analyze your interview data, the next step is to create a point of view statement based on the patterns and themes that emerged from your analysis. Learn how to create a point of view statement.
End of Module
Congratulations, you completed the third and final week of the Explore Humans path where you explored your project scope by learning from the perspectives of others.
As a team, decide how you want to continue exploring your project: through possibilities or a solution (or pick the path your team hasn’t explored yet).
We want to explore the possibilities for this project -> Go to Explore the Possibilities: Module 7
We have a solution in mind for how to solve our problem and want to explore it -> Go to Explore a Solution: Module 10
After your team has explored all three paths: Explore Humans, Explore the Possibilities, and Explore a Solution, continue to Module 13: Connect the Dots.
