Getting Out of My Head: A Sociologist’s Journey in Design Thinking
“Learning and applying the principles of design thinking awakened a new level of creativity within me by allowing me to connect to a skillset that had gone untapped for the majority of my time as a Sociology PhD student at Stanford. While reading, writing, and theorizing had become my bread and butter as a social scientist… I was suddenly thrust into a world of brainstorming, ideating, prototyping , collaborating, building, creating, and designing.”
Feeling Stuck: My Introduction to Design Thinking
One of the most frustrating periods of graduate school as a PhD student is the dissertation writing stage. After the data has been collected, cleaned, and analyzed, the time comes where you’re forced to wrestle with your ideas for months at a time writing and rewriting, thinking and rethinking, caffeinating and recaffeinating … until it feels like you’ve hit a wall.
That feeling of “stuckness” is my design thinking origin story, the moment that prompted me to seek out new, creative approaches to doing research. I began taking a few workshops here and there at Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, known affectionately as “the D. School.” These workshops allowed me to move away from the monotony of scholarly research. I went from spending hours in my office endlessly typing, cutting, and pasting sections in word documents to playing improv games and brainstorming in collaboration with other D. School affliates.
Soon enough, I decided to deep dive into the world of design thinking by applying to the Creativity in Research Scholars program, a six month program for PhD students interested in using design thinking principles to expand the scope of their research. I never could’ve imagined the chaos, frustration, personal growth, and intellectual expansion that would follow…
Start from Scratch: Becoming Comfortable in Discomfort
On the first day of class I clumsily attempted to explain theories of intersectionality and organizational inequality to my colleagues using stick figures, with nothing but a white board and red dry erase marker. As the only social scientist in a room full of PhD students in engineering, natural sciences, earth sciences, physics, and mathematics, I knew that I’d entered into a space well beyond my comfort zone.
It wasn’t long, however, before we all realized that we’d signed up for something without fully knowing what to expect. When learning about the ideation stage of the design process, we were often asked to brainstorm, choose an idea, develop that idea, then throw it out! As a group of overachieving PhD students trained to work on the same projects (or at least in the same subject area) for extended periods of time, this notion of starting from scratch was probably one of the hardest concepts for us to grasp. It also prompted one of the most useful lessons I learned. Getting too attached to a single idea inhibits the creativity process in design …. and in research.
Prototyping: From Imagining to Building
Over the course of the program, I would ultimately learn to get all of my ideas out on the page (no matter how ridiculous), pursue an idea, develop a prototype, get continuous feedback, and go back to the drawing board. Oftentimes, we teach the research methods process as linear: Question -> Methods -> Data Collection -> Findings -> Conclusion. Design thinking, however, views problem solving as an iterative process that looks less like a line, or even a cycle, and more like an arc with highs and lows along the way.
The beginning of my design arc actually started once I pushed myself even farther out of my comfort zone by considering other problems that were important to me outside of my own sociological research. This is how I landed on GoSeek, a web platform designed to address gaps in summer learning access by enhancing communication between parents and summer learning providers.
The Design Arc: Putting the Principles of Design Thinking into Practice
With the design thinking principles I’d learned and a new idea under my belt, I was finally able to move full force ahead on a final project for the program. I wanted to design something that could speak to the challenges that parents faced identifying summer learning opportunities for their kids.
When I’m not playing PhD Student, I work as a summer camp counselor. I have over ten years of experience developing and administering summer enrichment programs for youth in Birmingham, Alabama. Although my commitments to educating youth in the summer are just as important to me as a my scholarly work, I’d spent much less time considering problems in the field of summer enrichment and out-of-school time learning. This new topic area offered me a fresh, blank canvas for implementing the new design thinking skills I’d learned.
I started the design process by conducting empathy based interviews with stakeholders in the summer learning ecosystem including parents, summer camp counselors, and directors, to better understand their needs. I asked a series of questions like: What challenges do you face in the summer camp planning process? and What services would make developing your summer enrichment program easier?
I then took this information and narrowed down a HMW, or “How might we,” question. Recognizing that parents oftentimes faced challenges getting all of the information needed to make an informed decision about where to send their kids in the summer, I wanted to know: “How might we bridge gaps in communication between parents and summer programs.”
From there, I moved to the ideation stage where I brainstormed nearly twenty different products I could design for parents, children, and vendors to increase access to summer learning opportunities. I then narrowed my scope to focus on parent/summer camp provider relationships and decided that I wanted to develop a web platform that made it easier for parents to find a variety of summer opportunities in their local area.
Finally, it was time for what would become my favorite stage in the design process, prototyping. Using all of the materials accessible to me in the D. School, I began imagining what this type of platform would physically look like. I designed the 1st prototype for the website using colorful felt fabric, permanent markers, cut out shapes, tape, and an unfathomable number of sticky notes.
Prototype #1: GoSeek Summer Learning Database Website
After getting feedback from classmates and stakeholders, I designed a much more detailed version of the web pages and the types of information the user database would gather (Prototype #2).
Prototype #2
I developed a third more intricate prototype of the database using notion and designed a final mock website from scratch using Editor X that I debuted at our course open house. Watching my product come to life from the early brainstorming stages to a final product was the most rewarding part of this process.
Leveraging Design in Social Scientific Research
Learning and applying the principles of design thinking awakened a new level of creativity within me, by allowing me to connect to a skillset that had gone untapped for the majority of my time as a Sociology PhD student at Stanford.
While reading, writing, and theorizing had become my bread and butter as a social scientist… I was suddenly thrust into a world of brainstorming, ideating, prototyping , collaborating, building, creating, and designing.
I now apply the lessons I learned as a Creativity in Research Scholar in my research, teaching, and community work. I 100% believe that creative collaboration + free-flowing ideas + empathy driven prototypes + a little chaos = innovative solutions to the most pressing social problems
