HMW keep our partner's summer memories alive?

 

Equipped with our newly-minted knowledge of design thinking jargon, we were primed to embark on our first lap of human-centered design. Our mission? 

Discover - Define- Design - Deploy
Mount Vernon's non-linear phases of design thinking 

HMW help our partner hold on to their feelings of summer fun?

Using Mount Vernon's Compass to guide us through the phases of design thinking, we jumped in to discovery.



Discover: As the need for new skills arises, learn from others and in turn pass it on.

Student-designers engaged in an empathy interview.
True to our Mount Vernon norms, we started with questions. The first step was to conduct an empathy interview with our partners. Before beginning, however, we shared how we felt in some interviews that we have experienced in the past. What makes for a good interview question so that the interviewee shares openly, rather than with quick yes-no answers? How do we watch for non-verbal cues indicating if our interviewees were engaged and safe enough to share plenty of "data" from which to craft insights? HMW use our questions as a guide, but also feel free to dive deep when we observe a cue indicating passion? What do we do if our interview falls flat?  

Define: Making hope visible and giving form to ideas

Step 2: With the interview process recorded, we were ready to define our "problem." First, however, we needed to distill our data into insights and themes. 



Since we were practicing human-centered design, we crafted three needs statements based on our user and what they had shared about their experiences. 

(User) needs a way to ... so as to...

We now had a problem to solve for our user, and we proceeded to the design phase.

Design: Creates novel and meaningful artifacts for an audience

With our needs statements to launch from, we entered the phase of ideation, going for quantity over quality and of course encouraging wild ideas. You never know what your wild idea will spark in yourself or others! 

Ideation! Get those ideas out there!!

Now, here's the beauty of the non-linear nature of the design thinking process. With these ideas out of our heads, making our thinking visible, we need to return to discovery for feedback. Why would we design something for someone that they didn't want or see value in having? 
Iterate. Iterate. Iterate.


Now that we had feedback from our user, we applied that feedback to our prototype in order to iterate. We were now ready to deploy our iteration. 


Deploy: Places value on the success of a project through feedback, reflection, or transfer to novel situations.

A product launched by an iDL student-designer.

While not all of us got so far in the process to actually launch our final iteration, we still took the time to pitch our prototypes and talk through our design thinking process as we progress through the design challenge.

Pitching our prototypes.
With the pitches over, we reflected on the process and had fun along the way as we designed a product to help our partner hold on to their summer memories.

Next up, we will talk through how we are trying to foster student agency through self-assessment of their design thinking work.

More to come!

Join us on Twitter 
@TheMVDesignLab 
#impactfromthemiddle

Kevin Day @knowKMD
Todd Wass @toddw42

Ryan Welch @welch79

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