HOW CRISES TRIGGER CREATIVITY: Part 1: Prototyping a digital DESIGN THINKING MASTER CLASS -quick and dirty

Last week I booked a flight to Barcelona where I was going to co-facilitate the Introduction Week to Design Thinking for 40 intentional Master students of the ELISAVA University. I've had the pleasure to co-teach this kick-off week with Jorge Rodriguez since many years now. This has always been an amazing time of building long-lasting friendships, sharing aha-moments and reflecting on what everyone learned over tapas and wine on the streets of the vibrant city of Barcelona.

As educators we always kept in mind that this week served two goals:

• team-building and trust-building amongst 40+ international students (mostly between 25-35yrs old with 3+yrs of professional experience) that came from all over the world to live in Barcelona and learn with people from different cultures and backgrounds.
• teach everyone the BASICS of Design Thinking: tools, methods and mindset. Throughout the semester they can apply it on a real challenge from a real company/NGO/organisation.

Well... last Friday (7 days ago) it was clear that flights are cancelled and everyone needs to stay at home. We reacted quickly:

Fast forward day 5 of this Design Thinking Week, what are my insights and reflections?

• team-building and trust-building was difficult but also quite easy to reach- since we all share this unique crisis, it felt like we are a community right away #weareinthistogether. We did exercises of standing up, doing some body movements in front of the camera, goofing around and sharing emotional status-not only the project status.
• The positive mindset was KEY to actually keeping this week of teaching effective and efficient. We tried to stay focused on the challenges and methods and everyone worked really hard to accommodate the online experience, the tech problems ('Can you hear me?' 'Turn off your Mics please!' ..'Write your question in the chat!', 'Your connection is bad!'...) with the prior expectations (nice venue at the Rambla, laughters and coffee in the breaks, tapas after class).
• The DIGIAL LITERACY of our students (GenerationY and Z) was helpful : not only could easily adapt the tools we proposed, but they came up with own tools and used the DT methods the way they needed.
• It helped that some had done the Coolhunting and Trendresearch Master beforehand so they knew how to do Nethunting (Trend research in the Internet) as well as Desk Research and Data Insights form going to Forums, Blogs etc. They jumped on Skype calls with users and gathered amazing user-insights.
• In terms of peer-to-peer feedback amongst the 40 students it was difficult to keep everyone active and engaged. The ones that were engaged gave each other good feedback after the first ideas were presented.

Finally - these questions remain: how can we keep everyone engaged? How can we provide continuous mentoring and facilitation as educators, while protecting our time? And last question: when is this madness going to end, so we can go back at having human-to-human interactions that involve multi-sensoriy experiences (touch, feel, hear, smell etc) and will this CRISIS remind us what TECH CAN DO but more important WHAT ARE THE LIMITS OF TECH.