Storytelling’ electives. Other pursuits involve
independent exploration. Individual students, clubs, and
teams use the school's design-thinking and engineering
resources to deepen their own skills during recess,
electives, and the after-school program. Projects have
ranged from designing model houses to robotics
competitions.” (Nueva School, Design Thinking
Overview)
The Design Thinking process fosters several competences
in different phases, in which expansion and consolidation
take turns. This is the heartbeat of Design Thinking. The
phases are as follows:
Understand and Observe (Expanding)
The first step in the design process is to build up empathy
and understanding of the people and the situation the
problem or challenge is set in. The goal is to get a clue of
relations between the problem and its context, and to find
out hidden needs. Empathy is the competence of
recognising feelings, thoughts, intentions and
characteristics of others.
Synthesis (Consolidating)
In order to solve a problem and generate meaningful
ideas, one has to define the problem and its context. As
seen in the phase of understanding, there are different
perspectives on one particular problem and a lot of
information is generated to describe the problem. In the
synthesis phase, all this information needs to be
interpreted and condensed to meaningful insights, in
order to be able to generate actionable solutions. It
involves critical thinking and interpretation skills to
condense a lot of information into a compelling point of
view and clear direction for ideation.
Ideate (Expanding)
Ideation means opening up the mind, being imaginative
and generating lots of ideas for solving the problem.
Brainstorming in the team helps to build on the ideas of
others and collaboratively transforming the knowledge
about the problem and its origins into actionable problem
solving ideas. This is what pedagogy describes as the
competence of applying knowledge.
Prototype (Consolidating)
The prototype phase is all about experimentation to bring
ideas alive, to make them tangible, actionable, testable.
Learning more about the ideas, its possibilities in form and
function through building them. The goal of prototyping is
to be able to share ideas with others, to specify your
abstract imaginations and to get the mental concept of an
idea into the physical world.
Test (Expanding)
Testing means bringing the idea, the solution generated
through the design process into action in order to get
feedback on which to build on. Feedback from other
persons, from experts, from novices, from users, everyone
involved in the problem context. Through testing a lot of
information is gathered, in that it is similar to the observe
and understand phase. However, this information is
focused on the solution, and shows how well the problem
has been understood. It is important to be able to
communicate the idea you want to get feedback on, and
to capture and interpret that feedback in order to refine
your idea.
Iteration
Basically, the process follows these six steps that build on
each other while preserving a cyclical and iterative nature.
The star‘s outer lines and imagined arrows illustrate that it
is possible and desired to move from one phase to any
other at any point of time, as well as to repeat the whole
process or certain stages. The testing phase already
implies a smooth transition to the observing and
understand phase, as the problem context has changed
with your idea. Its iterative nature unfolds the whole