Design thinking: a valuable tool for social journalists
“Innovation is not an event, it is a process”, says professor Jeremy Utley, from Stanford, where the concept of design thinking was born.
Design thinking is an organized process that can help anybody — even those who do not think of themselves as creative people — — to come up with solutions to people’s problems, and this can have a great value for journalists.
Through this process we can understand how to approach communities, engage with individuals, listen to them and make others’ lives easier, serving them with solutions and ideas that meet their needs.
In the second class of our community engagement course, we discussed the five basic steps of design thinking that we can (and should) use in our social journalism projects. Here we go!
1. Empathize: In this phase we observe, listen to people and engage with community members. At this point, we don’t make assumptions, because we are trying to find a problem instead of solve one.We try to dig deeper to understand people’s feelings, underlying needs and desires.
2. Define: Now we look at the information we’ve gathered and look for some key points. At this stage, we will be able to identify some common needs and define a problem.
3. Ideate: Now we can start thinking about solution. It is valid to combine different perspectives and think about the problem from many diverse viewspoints. The rule of thumb here is brainstorming. We are not evaluating ideas yet, but trying to come up with as many as we can.
4. Prototyping: Now we build something to show to our community. And, give up on any kind of perfectionism, build your project and develop a plan fast.
5. Test: Have people testing your prototype. Observe how they interact with it, take very good notes on people’s feedback and beopen to modifying your product or changing your plans. Don’t defend your prototype. It is not about you, it is about your community. If you want to really serve the community, you need to listen to them.
For people who like to tell stories like me, design thinking can be very interesting process to pursue in that arena as well. As Adam Westbrook said in his Storytelling + Design Thinking article, we can use it to build “a narrative that pulls an audience in and delivers them elegantly to a meaningful climax, instead of just creating a logical arrangement of the facts”.
We can use design thinking as well to find ways to distribute stories different platforms and devices. As we’ve been seeing in our classes, there is a bunch of apps and tools to help us interact with our community, but we need to understand how and when .
Questions:
- Are you already using design thinking in your life?
- What is the most interesting part of this process?
- Do you think design thinking can be used for other purposes?
