As parents, we often hear that the future will require very different skills for our kids to be successful than we needed when we were growing up and for us to be successful in our careers.
The skills to be successful and flourish center around the mindset of innovators, problem-solvers and creators. As parents what can we do to help to prepare our children for these skills? How do we prepare them for the future? Fortunately, there is a tool that we can use at home to help support our children to innovate, create and problem solve. This tool is referred to as ‘Design Thinking’.
What is Design Thinking?
Design Thinking is used extensively in businesses large and small to help them innovate. You can think of it as a method to solve problems in innovative and creative ways.
Design Thinking is a solution-focused technique to solve a problem. As a creative process, it engages the user to empathize and understand a user’s needs; identify, and define problems; discover and develop ideas that are tested using prototypes to learn and iterate towards a solution.
This solution is then delivered to the users for their use and feedback.
Design thinking is a successful approach to solving problems because it focuses on user needs which are fundamental to a successful solution.
The great news is that design thinking can be applied and practiced in any aspect of your life. It is therefore an effective framework for parents to use with their children to prepare them for future success.
What benefits are there for my child?
Design thinking skills will support your child with developing:
- Empathy and compassion for the end user in understanding their needs
- The ability to identify and define problems to innovative creative solutions
- Openness and courage to take risks by trying new things
- Ethical and respectful in the way interact with the user
- Adaptability to learn, unlearn and relearn and ‘nothing is too big to solve’ attitude.
- Ability to develop resilience in dealing with the journey of failure of ideas that don’t work while continuing to seek a working solution
- Understanding the value of collaboration and feedback.
- Confidence to use their creativity to respond to new challenges.
Developing a Design Thinking Mindset
The Design Thinking process below will help guide you in the 6-step approach to solve problems, which will help develop a design thinking mindset in your child.
Dream
The Dream stage is capturing the dreams of your user – what are their needs, what problem to the face.
Your child will need to ask questions, to see how they can help find a solution. This stage develops compassion and empathy for others and their needs. By asking questions you can support and encourage this process:
- Whom are they designing the solution for?
- Have them choose their user. It could be a friend from school or even grandma.
- If possible, ask them to have a quick chat with the user and take notes.
- What are the user’s needs and pain points?
Define
After considering and understanding the needs of the end-user, in the define stage you must clearly define what problem you are going to solve.
Discover
The discover stage is where the fun starts and the creativity flows! Think of as many possible ways to solve the problem. Do not filter ideas for being crazy – all ideas are equal at this stage.
Develop
In the develop stage, you get to develop a small number of ideas as potential solutions, or partial solutions to your problem.
Use different materials to test possible ways to bring your chosen ideas to life. The resources you have access to will determine which ideas you can proceed with.
Lots of flexibility and adaptability are needed at this stage as you work on the solution.
Deliver
At this stage your child will have a final solution. Your child can proudly demonstrate their solution and how it works.
Determine
You can take the role of the user, support this process by asking your child to think about whether their solution is safe? Is it fun? How could they make it better next time? Does the solution meet the needs of the user?
Encourage your child to try modifying their solution to incorporate some of their user findings.
5 ideas to practice Design Thinking at home
There are many ways in which you can promote design thinking at home. Below are some ideas.
Have some fun with these design challenges.
LEGO Design Challenges
When your child is playing with LEGO, give them a design challenge – “can you design something that I can sit on?” (lots of LEGO required!), or “design something to store my car keys so I don’t lose them”.
Re-design their bedroom layout
In this design challenge, your child gets to use their imagination and creativity to design their bedroom how they would like it.
How would they like to use the space of their room? Where will the furniture go? Where will their toys go? What color will the walls be painted? After you have seen their design plans – you may choose to allow them to make the changes!
Design a dinner party for a grandparent (or another family member).
All children love a party, and in this design challenge, they get to plan a dinner party for a family member.
Make this truly memorable and experiential learning experience through having your child to deliver the full experience: decide on the recipes, buy the ingredients, and then make the food as part of this challenge.
Design a (socially distanced) party game
During the COVID-19 pandemic, there are many restrictions on our daily activities and what we can do. Have your child create a party game that maintains social distancing.
This could be used at a birthday of a sibling or a friend or as a game your family can have fun playing together.
Can you design a new party game that children could play while they keep at least 2 metres away from each other?
Design a rollercoaster
In this design challenge, you will create a prototype of a rollercoaster.
You need to get your users (use a marble or ball to represent the people) from point A to point B safely and in the most thrilling way.
You will need lots of cardboard, toilet rolls, newspaper, tape. When the rollercoaster is complete, send the ball through the rollercoaster – see how quickly the ball can get from the start to the finish line without falling out!
A great example can be found here: Marble Roller Coaster
The world is full of endless challenges waiting to be solved.
Have your children practice their creativity and innovation skills through Design Thinking to come up with some solutions.
