Design Thinking has been linked to business innovations for the last decade, but I personally always been impressed and want to include more about social innovation cases when it comes to my courses or trainings.
Design Thinking, hence the name, requires a certain mindset, which starts with the naive, yet necessary notion of optimism. If you don’t believe your mind solve problems, or can do good for the world, then this practice may not be for you.
One of the cases that demonstrates the optimism; is Innova Schools in Peru. It is an exciting case, for both the world and design thinkers worldwide.
Carlos Rodrigez-Pastor is well educated and privileged Peruvian, who runs a network of malls, pharmacies, and banks in his country. He may live his life like surfing on a mild wave without diving or falling in the depth of dark waters…However, he chooses to tackle on a case which is one of the main problems of the world: education.
Industries are working on sustainability, politicians on borders and resources, business on innovation, health on obesity and related illness…They are all linked to education. Education, on the other hand does not support our neutral way of learning or how our brain operates, but it is called a system. A system that is designed by humans for humans almost like an industrial production line; where you put the crude material, add components and polish fine details.
People who are looking for ways to improve “how we learn” are my personal heroes. This is why I wanted to share my insight on Design Thinking with this example. Carlos Rodrigez-Pastor sees that his country is not doing good on education and he believes he can do something about this! Which is optimism and creative confidence as a bundle. So cooperates with IDEO and Khan Academy on this case. They use Design Thinking methodology to understand and define the underlying problem.
When I have trainings or workshops in companies, the most problematic stage of Design Thinking comes at the “Define” stage. Being a Turkish educator, I don’t translate this step to Turkish, but I tell to my class that this is the hidden treasure! (The word “define” pronounced as “deaf-in-a” in Turkish and it means hidden treasure). When we start from the right question, we get excited, our mind starts flowing, we all want to take part in the ideation session and new ways of ideas emerge. Usually not the case in business meetings, workshops or facilitation on world matters, discussion on ecology…
These smart people see problems, and they have an idea on “what needs to be done” but nobody asks the question “how might we!”.
People always talk on “What needs to be done to improve the education system!” but, one person asking the question of “How might we help young brains learn efficiently to reach their potential?” changes the whole way we think, and apparently starting from Peru, South America…
This is the power of design, and I love what I do!
Asking the right questions, involves the ones who are aware of the problems, for a start. Only pointing out the problem does not solve it alone. Optimism in design is the belief that you can and will come up with creative solutions to big problems. The decision to solve the world problems and use your resources like; time, money, connections, mind…on the mission for doing this, defines doing well and doing good!
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