In-Class Activity: Final Project Design Thinking

The main tenet of Design Thinking is empathy for the people you're trying to design for. — David Kelley

Design thinking offers a structured approach to innovation, enabling developers to empathize with users, define problems, ideate solutions, prototype, and iterate.

Submitting your Work

In groups, use this shared Google Doc to record your discussion about each Final Project idea. If you are working in a team for your project, it can be helpful to split up for this exercise to get more feedback on your idea.

Each person is responsible for taking notes on the discussion for their project idea, including keeping track of who initiated major ideas within the discussion.

Specifications

In turns, for each idea:

• present your idea, target users, specific learning goals, pain points, and ideal positive impact
• everyone else take turns asking questions from the target user's perspective to get the presenter to think more deeply about the presented idea, especially generating possible:
  • persona qualities
  • ethical and equity issues
  • negative impacts
  • data needs
  • differentiating features
  • social or collaborative features
• everyone else take turns generating a diverse range of potential solutions to the problems or pain points
• everyone else take turns brainstorming User Stories for the presented idea (brief statements that express what users need) in the form:
  

  As a (role), I want (function) so that (value).

  • the three elements of the standard User Story format address 3 of the 5 Ws of journalistic story telling:
    • Who wants the functionality
    • What it is they want
    • Why they want it
  • and it seems reasonable to leave out When and Where since the answers are typically “right now” and “in the product” :)

At this stage, brainstorming means focusing on the quantity of ideas over their quality by practicing “Yes, and” to build on what another person shares, rather than objecting to or tearing ideas down the idea. Other suggestions to help you ideate include:

• questioning or reversing your assumptions
• wishing for or exaggerating an idea
• asking "why?" repeatedly to get to the heart of the idea
• focus on the project's central issue or concern
• or even using this AI powered brainstorming tool :)