Design Challenge Explanation Design thinking is a methodology that teaches children the confidence to creatively solve problems in their lives. This is important because modern educations focus on facts and questions with singular right answers only partially prepares students to deal with the complex problems they face now and during the rest of their lives. Design thinking helps students confidently tackle real life problems. We believe that confidence comes from repeated practice using a creative process to solve problem scenarios called design challenges. After using the process on these challenges, they will be able to use the process on their own on real life problems. Because the process is human centered and relies on thinking of, building, and testing actual solutions students motivation lies in using it on authentic, meaningful problems.

Our process Empathy: Collect Insights around how people are experiencing problems Define: Define the problem Ideate: Generate potential solutions to the problem Prototype: Build out the solutions that people can interact with Test: Test the prototypes The way we practice using the process is by working through design challenges. A design challenges is a statement that creates a scenario for which students can use the process to design solutions. For example, How might we reduce the amount of waste that people send to the landfill?

The best framing does not constrain them to one problem to solve nor leave it too broad that they have trouble finding tangible problems. One way to frame a design challenge is to treat it like a story; develop Characters, Conflicts, and Context. Characters: Have a few different characters that students can explore Conflict: Have a range of potential conflicts so that students can choose what problem to define Context: Create a diverse enough setting for the problems and people to take place Generally, the more scoped these elements are the shorter the challenge. For example, we often have students redesign a partner’s backpack. In this case there is one main character and only a few potential conflicts and contexts meaning that the student can go through the process in an hour or so.

An example of a project that might be too scoped is: Design a light that actually works. While that might be a fantastic engineering or artistic project in itself, we would change it to be more human centered: Design a way to illuminate a living space for rural farmers in India. The characters, conflicts, and context has more variety in the second statement and provides ample space in which to use our design thinking tools.