I attended an interesting webinar this afternoon on Design Thinking by Linda Yaven, Professor at California College of the Arts. It was hosted by the folks from Catalyze.
The essential message I got from the discussion was that Design Thinking is not something esoteric and strange, but that it does require a shift of thinking and doing that most people can do. I also heard a lot of elements of other ideas around innovation and innovative thinking. She referenced Ideo's methodologies and the Emilia Reggio approach to preschool education.
Yaven also talked about a perspective on documents and "requirements documents." Rather than focusing on the final product, create something she calls a "responsive document." Show how ideas evolve and veer off and go wrong and get corrected. Do it with pictures, drawings, mind maps, and with words. The claim, with which I mostly agree, is that this gives the people involved a much greater sense of cohesion and ownership in the process and the final product.
Here are Linda Yaven's Six Design Thinking Values, most of which she covered in the discussion.
- Learning by doing
- Multiple modes of communication
- Testing ideas
- Transparency
- Equivalency
- Protagonista (a term from the Reggio Emilia approach)
Ben. I assume you know about this style of thinking.