Increasing Impact Through Innovation
Design Thinking in EDU-Action
Participatory Design Studio
On January 15th, the Business Innovation Factory (BIF) Student Experience Lab (SXL) headed down to New Haven, CT to facilitate a participatory design studio with Fund For Teachers (FFT). FFT has supported educators for over a decade by giving them opportunities to self-design learning experiences to inspire them and develop professionally. We have been working with FFT to help them increase their impact.
Our BIF SXL crew met with FFT Staff, and past and current Fellows at a historic two story building at Yale University, where we had our design studio. Karen Webb, Director of FFT, explained why she brought this group together, “Our hope was that if we had the different experiences of these different kinds of fellows, they would give us the most fertile view of what might be possible.” We kicked off the participatory design studio with a round of introductions. “What is one hope you have for this event? What is one thing that excites you in your life right now?” asked our Student Experience Lab Director, Sam Seidel. It was clear that many of the Fellows were looking forward to helping FFT to grow, as well as connecting with other Fellows.
To get everyone’s creativity flowing, we played a game called Disruptus. Participants rolled a six sided die (we made out of a cardboard box!) to select experiences to redesign. We redesigned grocery stores to include scannable produce to give you recipes based on ingredients, and multi-track shopping experiences for people with little time, and those with more time! We remixed laundromats as community centers. In a short amount of time on Friday afternoon, a dozen teachers were able to generate some awesome ideas.
Understanding Impact
Although everyone in the room had been to grocery stores, not everyone used laundromats. “It was hard to design a place when we don’t know what it’s like to be there,” one participant mentioned. Understanding the experience of the end user, or those greatly impacted by a service or institution, is critical. This is why FFT brought Fellows together. In an effort to think deeply about the experiences of people impacted by the fellowship, we had participants interview students and colleagues in their schools. We also had our participants consider the experiences of other people affected by the fellowship. We explored how the fellowship impacted students, community members, non-Fellow teacher colleagues, and partners.
How could we express the experiences of all our end users? Why not through limericks? We had participants put together limericks based on the experiences of different users in order to help them conceptualize how FFT was impacting those users, and of course to be creative and have fun. Here is an example of one limerick:
Designing New Opportunities
Bringing these experiences forward, participants created specific visions for how FFT could amplify the impact for these different user groups. Thinking about these different user groups was the core of our work. Tara Rana, a past Fellow mentioned, “I’m here because one of the things you realize as a Fellow, especially one that has had some distance, is that you’d like to be able to see the benefits of it continue, whether it is for yourself or other people.
We then had all our participants generate different ideas for how the FFT program could amplify the impact for each user group. The Fellows went around the room, putting ideas on post-its, and building off other participants’ thoughts. We used our “Yes, and” approach, to help keep the conversation generative and not get bogged down by restrictions and limitations. Yes, and, is an activity in which participants build off each others’ ideas by adding something new in order to create bigger, and more complex idea. We came up with some really wild ideas like recording your fellowship trip with a GoPro, and converting it into an educational program that students could see via a 3d gaming device like the Oculus Rift. Fellows came up with community partnership programs, and a networking platform that could put Fellows in touch with each other based on similar fellowship experiences.
Participants formed groups to pull out specific ideas, or synthesize ideas together to come up with concepts for how FFT might broaden their impact with different users. At the end of the activity, we came up with 10 “high flying concepts,” that we would begin working on. We encouraged participants to form groups or work individually (everyone chose to work in groups) to focus on one concept and build it out in order to see how it would work, and how it would contribute by amplifying impact.
Next Steps
Fellows came out with some amazing ideas, and even more amazing ways of presenting them! The refined ideas addressed different ways FFT could engage with and support teachers, students, community members, and regional partners. It was energizing to see educators feeling empowered as designers. Lili Brown, Managing Director of Connecticut mentioned, Through this process, we were able to really honor these teachers. Through a really good mix of play and tough thinking, they were respected and heard as designers and innovators, creating new solutions for amplifying FFT’s impact.”
We are working hard to continue to flesh out these ideas, and share them. In the coming weeks we will continue to work the Fellows to strengthen these concepts, and identify and utilized patterns that emerged from the participatory design studio that will help FFT grow. For more information and updates on our work with FFT, check out the project page.
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