Week 6: Developing Your Why & How

Brainstorming actions to solve your chosen problem

Last week you had the chance to speak with me by phone to clarify your problem and next steps. This week you are going to talk with the people involved with your project (target audience & experts), do some research online and develop the ¨why¨ and ¨how¨ to solving your problem.

I. Interviews and Research

Now that you have identified your problem, your target audience and experts related to your topic it is time to go out and talk with people to gather ideas. You should spend most of your time this week talking with these two groups (target audience & experts) about the problem you have identified, as well as your idea(s) to solve it, to get their perspective. Also, you should spend some time doing research online by looking for examples of how you might solve your problem. As mentioned last week, be sure to capture your ideas in a way that you can begin to interpret them (example below).

From the Design Thinking for Educators toolkit: https://www.ideo.com/post/design-thinking-for-educators

II. Developing Your Why and How

Now that you have talked with your target audience and experts, as well as done online research, you can begin to imagine why it is important to solve your problem and how you can do this based on your why. To do this, you are doing to create a Why-How ladder (see example below)

From Design for Change: https://s3.amazonaws.com/dfcusa_pm/activities/DFCUSA-IMAGINE-DevelopingTheWhyTheHow.pdf

To create your Why-How ladder [1]:

• Write the problem that you are trying to solve in the top box.
• On the left side under Why, write all of the ¨whys¨ for the impact that this would have on the community you are working with.
• On the right side under How, connect why this is important to how you will do it, which is the action step(s) you will take. You can repeat some of the hows for each why.
• Note: Make sure to use the ideas from your interviews to create your why and how.

Assignment:

For this weeks assignment* you will need to do three things:

By Sunday, October 22:

1. Speak with your experts related to your topic as well as your target audience to learn from their perspective.
2. Research the websites you listed on your week 4 document and those that you discussed with me on your mentor call.
3. Make a copy of this Google Doc, fill it out using the information that you have gathered and email me your completed Google Doc so that I can give you feedback.

• As always, please email me if you have any questions related to the assignment.

Sources:

[1] The Why-How Ladder idea, examples and guiding questions come from the Design for Change USA Portal using the lesson Developing The Why And The How.