Design Thinking — An Approach To Nurturing The Innovator Within Your Child.
No, it’s not about Istituto Marangoni (not at all). This is the new method being implemented to provide the necessary boost to creativity and problem-solving skills. It is an indispensable skill for young minds who will be innovators of tomorrow!
Now, What is Design Thinking?
Design thinking is basically the term used to refer to a mindset that seeks innovation and creativity in every aspect. It was popularised by David Kelley through his design firm IDEO and his Stanford’s d.school.
Knowing answers to the predefined questions and modifying them isn’t enough. We need to find solutions to the new problems which the future threatens to pose. Design thinking is the power that drives these innovators, creators, and problem solvers. It implements a “solution-based” approach and proves to be helpful to parents and educators in raising creators for life.
The former approach!
It was mostly applied for product design to innovate businesses. Even today it continues to be so with leading companies in the world, like Apple and Google, adopting this Design Thinking approach. But now it has been recognized as a powerful tool for bringing innovation in the fields of education, healthcare, and social enterprises, as well.
It is being realized that this is not a conventional subject to be taught but instead a methodology that needs to be practiced.
What is the process involved?
Design thinking is an easy approach to learn some skills of worth, but the internal process involved is complex with many steps in it.
Empathizing means understanding the user’s needs and keeping his interests at the core.
Defining refers to understanding what the problem actually is, based on the user’s needs and finding its causes.
Ideate refers to brainstorming a number of possible solutions to the problem found.
Then come the next steps, prototyping and putting the mettle to test through rapid testing of these to generate feedback and ultimately learning and progressing towards a better solution.
For projects involving more self-expression, this process is rephrased as ideate, create, and reflect. This methodology, if practiced diligently, can help creators of all ages to become focused and disciplined regarding their projects.
Why is it significant for children and how does it help in their development?
The distinctly visible significance of this approach is the increase in efficiency and quality of the output achieved.
Apart from this, there are many inconspicuous, long term effects, especially for young ones.
It empowers them by developing confidence and helps instill a ‘creative mindset’ focused on not just using technology for consumption but also for creating.
The last step of the process teaches them to reflect. This is quite important as reflecting on one’s mistakes, experiences, and achievements help attain expertise and are essential for creativity to flourish. It also helps them to learn to embrace failures, accept criticism constructively and to take calculated risks, thus developing persistence.
Developing skills of planning, executing, and critical thinking /reflection come handy throughout life.
Inculcating Design Thinking in Early Education.
It needs to be inculcated in the children’s education because at this tender age, executive function skills (higher-order skills such as planning and organizing) are at a formative stage.
Design thinking plays an important role in preparing children for an uncertain future by developing a makers’ mindset.
According to the World Economic Forum’s 2016 Future of Jobs report, complex problem-solving remains the top skill required in the workforce. This is followed by critical thinking and creativity. This shows the increasing demand and needs for creative problem-solvers that we should be nurturing from the early years.
It is quite important to implement this creative problem-solving approach in schools as well because it helps to engage every kid into the process and proves to be beneficial to them, including even the students who are not as active participants as their peers.
Children, in their early years, should be encouraged to satiate their curiosities and seek answers.
Students can be encouraged to put up presentations and devise creative ways of portraying their work.
They should be taught to work in teams, collaborating and getting involved in healthy discussions.
This helps them to understand others’ perspectives and broaden their own. This would strengthen the bond among children leading to mutual respect.
Teachers need to have open discussions with children allowing them to speak up without criticizing their wild ideas. They need to teach the children that sharing their thoughts and ideas is important and makes them feel welcomed.
This is an important aspect which helps in the development of many other skills and thus is worth considering at the formative stage of the child.
Ideas to try in everyday life.
Creativity cannot be taught. It is an innate quality which needs to be stimulated. Schools, though trying to implement design thinking into the curriculum, cannot provide desired results unless the same efforts are made at home as well.
Hence, here are a few ideas to try at home in order to develop an inclination towards design thinking in your children.
Instead of asking them to redesign a solution, give them small challenges and let them use their creativity to come up with uncountable solutions. For example, instead of asking them to design a vehicle (using Lego maybe) ask them to design something to transport objects, and see what all ideas they come up with.
Teach them to understand user needs and empathise by keeping in mind the person/consumer for whom they are designing a product, and also their specific needs and requirements.
Let them interpret the problem on their own as per their understanding and think of creative solutions.
Then let them create the design they have planned while recognizing the limitations and constraints. When they are done, let them show a demo of the product and hence allow them to test the product for themselves.
Let them develop methods for improvement and encourage them to reflect on their mistakes to learn the lesson. Repeat this process until the desired outcome is achieved. Don’t forget to reward them when they make progress and also when they finally do it.
How designing and coding games can strengthen this concept of design thinking in a fun and easy way.
When children create a game of their own, they have to go through many steps and keep a lot of things in mind, that too, unconsciously. They don’t actually realize that they are doing a task but instead enjoy what they do while learning a lot in this process.
A game involves many levels, with varied outcomes. It has to be designed and scripted accordingly. One’s own point of view has to be considered along with the framework of other’s needs and views. This makes them empathetic towards others’ needs as well.
Scripting various scenarios require creativity and let them speak out all the crazy ideas in their minds. Finally writing the code and implementing their ideas teaches them to reflect on their mistakes, while debugging the errors found during execution. This helps them to learn better and improve the output obtained.
The best part about it is that they learn all these skills while playing and enjoying, without even knowing that they are taking the design thinking approach.
Creative ways to implement design thinking
- Learning to design, code and create games and animations. Check out Turing Ninjas for such creative and exciting courses in coding.
- Osmo little genius stories game which allows out of the box thinking and applying creative reasoning to solve the problems.
- Workshops and events organized for kids as well as teachers.
- Various competitions to help execute and practice design thinking skills.
There is a pressing need to quickly evolve the way our society prepares children to take on future challenges. And this requires an early start.
Skills such as planning, focus, self-control, awareness, and flexibility — also known as executive functioning and self-regulation skills, need to be imbibed from an early age. These essential skills are beneficial in the long run.
Thus, having read about the benefits and the necessity of design thinking, it is clear why there’s so much focus on it being implemented. As parents, it is your responsibility to teach your kids to take the right approach towards learning.
And design thinking is the right approach. Hence, try and implement it now and help nurture the innovator within your child.
