A human-centered future-focused approach like Design Thinking is so relevant in today’s academic context like never before. Especially when we hear insights from academic or industry leaders commenting about the lack of employability amongst graduates & post-graduates. While the National Education Policy (NEP 2020) of India emphasizes the role of Design Thinking as one of the important and essential skills to be possessed by the students and an important subject to be inculcated and imbibed by the faculty foremost, Design Thinking is simply beyond a subject. It’s about mindset and fostering the ability to connect the dots to bridge the gap between domain knowledge (taught in academics) and industry problems (when the fresher joins any industry), which is the crux of employability. Through this short blog, we shall shed some light on the role of Design Thinking in education
Design Thinking in Education – A Perspective
1.The battle between Skill vs Perspective (Connecting the dots)
Skill – It is about awareness of anything. It can be a programming language, accounting, marketing etc. Expertise – It is about continuous application of skills. Expertise comes along with experience as someone applies that skill continuously.
Perspective – It is about visualizing expertise/multiple such expertise, at a business level. It involves seeing things from a 10000 ft-level to understand a macro overview of the scheme of things.
A typical college/university may prepare students with skills and based on some internship/apprenticeship, they may gain expertise. Innovation is possible only at a perspective level when you bring multiple expertise together. Industry problems today need such connecting the dots between different expertise. Automation is taking care of providing expertise but students these days need perspective in their vision.
In our philosophy of Design Thinking we focus a lot on shifting people from Skill to Expertise to Perspective and how it helps to connect the dots to generate a rush of innovation when there is proper alignment. We term this process as ‘5 Forces of Growth – SEPIA©’ .
Incumbent curriculum need a total revamp to shift from Expertise to Perspective.
This framework is one of our indigenous Design Tools that deals with visualizing anything at a landscape view/perspective view. We also call it in our Design parlance as ‘Knowledge Shelving’ where we form clusters/compartments of knowledge items and thus to find correlation between any two clusters/compartments. A good amount of ‘connecting the dots’ happens because of this tool. Having said that, the tool doesn’t stop only at perspective level (L0). It goes into deeper levels such as L1, L2, and L3 etc. For detailed understanding, kindly refer to our blog (link at the end).
To apply the same into the academic context, students can visualize their entire curriculum to get the bigger picture (L0) and how individual subjects, topics within subjects (L1,L2 etc) can come together to make sense of the entire syllabus. Similarly, they will also be able to draw co-relation between two subjects. This connection is essential to foster innovation.
3.Dynamics of student project team vs. dynamics of corporate team
Beyond Knowledge and Domain, this aspect needs to gain more attention from every stakeholder of the academic ecosystem.
Undoubtedly, college project work/group activities build more collaboration, more inclusion of diverse ideas and do come handy in developing a broader repertoire for any student. But the dynamics of student project teams (interpersonal relationship between students) in college projects can’t be compared to dynamics of corporate teams (interpersonal relationship between employees) in a typical office team.
In real-time projects, there are tighter deadlines, stringent measures of quality of delivery, completely driven by professionalism, getting work done from colleagues, getting work done /relying on even unknown team-members etc. A lot depends on understanding a team-member better and this is possible through empathy (putting ourselves in someone’s shoes). This comes a long way in the wider perspective of Organizational Behavior. Along with domain-centred knowledge, the curriculum/pedagogy also should focus on some areas of Human-Centricity (Cultivating Empathy).
Persona is a very critical Design Thinking tool that explains whether we have understood a stakeholder well enough. Persona plays a fundamental role in understanding the Human Centric insights which is the crux of Design Thinking problem solving approach. A correct, deep Persona is actually an outcome of Empathy. Utilizing persona contextually can address some of the issues mentioned above. E.g.- Creating Personas of team members for better team-dynamics can take the inter-personal relationship between team members several notches up. A tool such as Persona can come handy in unearthing several user-centric insights, especially when you are trying to solve customer’s problems.
We would request you to peruse through one of our interesting blogs on persona based storytelling. (link at the end)
While we can delve further into the role of Design Thinking in today’s academic scenario, we have tried to expand in this blog a few areas only. One of School of Design Thinking’s marquee customers have applied Design Thinking to change their ecosystem. For insightful reading, we would request you to go through this case study.
Do let us know how we can equip your faculty on Design Thinking through some of our flagship programs.
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