Design Thinking: A Human-Centered Approach to Innovation in Education

This is totally what I want to do as a career! I love this kind of thinking/problem solving, application & impact.

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Design Thinking: A Human-Centered Approach to Innovation in Education

--Talk to any educator, parent, or policy maker and you will inevitably hear about the many problems that exist in education. It's not for lack of trying—millions of people are working across the country to find new solutions for our schools. And yet we're struggling to find new answers that make a real difference. (I totally agree!)

--We tend to think first about the needs of the system and create solutions from there. But what if we looked first to the needs of people, and then designed ways the system could meet its goals by serving these needs? This is the heart of how design thinking gets to innovative solutions.

--Recently IDEO, the design and innovation firm where I work, collaborated with San Francisco Unified School District to develop a new vision for their food system. Instead of starting from a typical approach to food system reform - auditing equipment, aligning policies - we started by thinking about the students. What do they care about? What would engage them in choosing the healthy meals SFUSD already offers them? And then how might we realign finances, operations and labor to create experiences kids would want?

--Every day people show up at work in our schools because they care deeply about our kids. Yet we often end up designing experiences that don't actually meet these kids where they are. We unintentionally turn them off. So much so that they don't believe we would design something that they would actually like.

--Often it is that very thinking that gets in the way of creating experiences that engage today's youth. What if we took a human-centered approach to the design of our schools, tools and systems? People, and our understanding of them, are the heart of innovation.

--Every parent, teacher, administrator, edtech developer, and policymaker I have met has been aligned on one thing: everyone wants what's best for our children. Few, however, are aligned on what that means we should be doing.

--If we really want to innovate in education, we must let go of our assumptions about how schools work, and open up to what really understanding our students can teach us about what we should be creating.