Week 4 Notes

This Week’s Topics:

1. Needfinding
2. Design Justice

Needfinding

Week 4 was an especially exciting week with our design project launch and guest speaker Louie Montoya!

Louie, a designer in Residence at the d.school and K12 Lab Network, arrived with a daunting question: What is design? One student responded: “perhaps, a means to get from ideation to actualization.”

Louie dove into the importance of needfinding, and led a Journey Map workshop where students mapped their emotions and events of yesterday. On the Y-axis was a scale from “-” to “+” and the X-axis consisted of the progression of time. After sharing out their maps, students honed in on a low point in their partner’s day and practiced needfinding, asking ‘why’ and open ended questions to dig deeper.

Louie Montoya

“Tear down walls, and use the rubble to build a more equitable education system.”

In this activity, students grappled with interview challenges, such as reaching depth in conversation in a limited interview time slot and asking non-leading questions. One student asked “How do you disconnect from your own experiences?” Louie responded, “You can’t.” We naturally make assumptions on emotions, and it can be especially difficult when you do not share experiences with another. That is why it is important to be open minded and understanding, relaying what you interpret back to the interviewee to see if your understanding is accurate.

Class Project Launch

For the class project launch, teams of students had the opportunity to choose between (1) mental health/ loneliness, (2) bike record, and (3) Stanford hates fun problem spaces. In the second class of the week, the design teams shared out their chosen problem space and design questions (shown below). Students then collaborated in class with their teammates in brainstorming a needfinding plan.

Design Justice

“How do we do design work in ways that truly respond to, are led by, and ultimately benefit the communities most targeted by intersectional and structural inequality?”

In this week’s reading, students read Chapter 2 of Design Justice. This chapter

Human Centered Design (HCD): “includes end-users in the design process through various strategies […] but has little to say about values, community accountability or control, or the ultimate distribution of benefits such as profits or attention”

Participatory Design (PD) and Codesign: “include end-users throughout the design process [and] aim to develop feelings of investment and ownership in the outcomes by all participants”

T4SJ Project’s concrete suggestions for community accountability: