What's Design Thinking got to do with Higher Education?

Or to misquote Tina Turner: “What’s design thinking got to do with it? What’s empathy but a second-hand emotion?”

Before a late career change, I worked for a large technology company which was seeking to become more customer focused. Working in an innovation role, I was delighted when the organisation placed more emphasis on “design thinking” or “human-centred design”. Nowadays, I teach students to understand and apply many of the same design thinking and related techniques I used when working in the company and with other organisations.

In academia, many people are unfamiliar with (and sometimes downright suspicious and sceptical of) terms such as “design thinking” and “human-centred design”. Although this may be true, there’s a much more positive side too. Many of my colleagues and peers apply similar concepts and approaches every day, for example when creating or improving modules, without even thinking about it.

What do I mean by this? Well, they might not be using design thinking techniques such as personas, empathy maps and needs statements, but they certainly emphasise with their students. When they’re developing new programmes and modules, they define student needs and learning outcomes and design teaching and learning in ways which students can best achieve these. For example, they understand that not all students learn in the same way and seek to include a variety of approaches and resources to address different student needs.

For existing modules, they assess student feedback and ideate (although most of us though probably prefer to use a phrase such as “generate improvement ideas”). They implement (or what some design thinkers might call prototype) improvements and test them during the next run of the module.

And then they iterate. They read the room. They review student feedback, surveys and evaluations. What worked? What didn’t? What new ideas and approaches can be learned from colleagues’ practice, journals or conferences? What can we do differently to create a better student experience next time?

In a way, they’re following the classic “design thinking” five-phase loop.

1. Empathising with students and other stakeholders.
2. Defining their needs.
3. Ideating what we can do to make a positive difference.
4. Implementing (or prototyping) improvements to meet student needs.
5. Testing them out, gaining feedback and going back through the loop for the next run of the module.

So what? If academic colleagues are already taking a design thinking-based approach, why should we care? Personally, I draw three conclusions from this discussion.

Firstly, some colleagues aren’t using the above approach and don’t take enough note of the needs of their students and other stakeholders. If so, perhaps they need to be encouraged and supported to do this, but that’s beyond the scope of what we’re discussing here.

Secondly, for the many colleagues who have bought into the above approach, there are tools and techniques that many of them are unaware of which can really help. Design thinking and related approaches provide some great and very practical ways to generate empathy, define problems, generate, review and prioritise ideas, implement / prototype ideas and gain feedback so we can make the next set of improvements. I know this because the teaching team I work with use them, and we see the benefits for our students.

As a start, at the 英国利兹大学 , we’ve created a new bottom-up Design Thinking Community to share ideas and good practice. Looking more widely, it would be great to create a kitbag for educators to make it much easier for them to use design thinking techniques.

Thirdly, and to support the previous point, work needs to be done to make it easier for educators to understand, adopt and gain the benefits of using design thinking and human-centred design. How can we do this? One approach is to better align the language and techniques used in design thinking with higher education frameworks. If you think that sounds like a good idea, well...

I’m working with a great team of people at the 英国曼彻斯特大学 , 英国兰卡斯特大学 and the 英国利兹大学 to do just this. We’re beginning with taking a look at how we can align Design Thinking to support the UK Advance HE Professional Skills Framework (PSF), but we don’t have all the answers yet. (You can find the PSF here: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/teaching-and-learning/psf)

Why don’t you join in and help us?

We’re running three collaborative workshops – one in Leeds on 25 March, at Manchester on 24 April and in Lancaster on 4 June. To get full details and register to attend one, two or all of them, please follow this link: https://forms.office.com/e/PeSxieFNyv

?Perhaps we can make empathy a first-hand emotion? If you can attend or not, we’d love you to join in the debate. Please add thoughts and comments below.

#designthinking #highereducation Sarah Dyer Radka Newton Dan Trowsdale Iria lopez Jeff Grabill Josephine Shaddock