Centre on people’s needs and goals
Let empathy and genuine human understanding guide better decision making and create meaning.
Centring on people’s needs and goals means getting out from behind our desks, into the communities we’re looking to serve, and talking to people.
By participating in interviews and observations first-hand instead of only reading survey reports, we see the power of directly and deeply interacting with a small sample size of university stakeholders. In HE, decision making is often hierarchical and key stakeholders can be treated as institutional abstractions rather than real humans with needs. When we centre on people’s needs and goals, we see the ‘why’ behind why people do what they do and this means we make more meaningful interventions.
Design Thinking or Human-Centred Design is an innovative approach to problem finding and solving that starts with people and ends with solutions uniquely tailored to meet identified needs. Building mutual empathy between students, lecturers, staff and the university executive is integral in the collaborative and iterative design and redesign of the university operating system.
Principle 1 Design Thinking Tools include: Participant Interviews, Observations, Cultural Probe Kits, Experience/Journey Mapping and Empathy Mapping.
Principle 1 in Action: Designing for Students from Under-Represented Groups
The Maynooth University Access Programme (MAP) partnered with the Department of Design Innovation to investigate if a Design Thinking approach could be used to:
- Improve & innovate the orientation programme
- Provide a means for new and current MAP students to share experiences
- Provide MAP staff with actionable insights into the unarticulated needs and experience of students, reframe their understanding of the challenges and provide new tools and collateral for further use
Two workshops were run with approximately 50 students in each. The workshops consisted of empathy mapping and experience mapping exercises.
The Empathy Mapping Exercise consisted of participants drawing on their own experience as an incoming student to complete an empathy map capturing things they say, think, hear, feel and do. This included salient quotes, feelings and opinions as well as their pain and gain points (motivations). The goal of empathy mapping is to gain a deeper level of understanding of a participant, within this given context.
For the Experience Mapping Exercise, participants were instructed to discuss their experience at university and map out the high and low points of their journey, documenting the different events that took place and the emotions experienced along the way using a scale of high, neutral or low experience (-5 to +5). Experience Mapping provided valuable insight into what it is like to walk in the footsteps of the students, highlighting subtle highs and lows.
