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Design Thinking animates Perpich artscience program

An “Introduction to Design Thinking” workshop in Golden Valley engaged local professionals and students from the Perpich Arts High School artscience class to think outside the box  this week.

 

The event, sponsored by the Design Thinking Minnesota Meet-Up group, was on the Perpich campus and facilitated by Anna Love-Mickelson, owner of Stoke.d, a Minnesota company, and a teacher in executive education at the Stanford d.School, and Scott Mark, a Medtronic innovation team leader.

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Love-Mickelson and Mark led participants through a series of exercises to introduce them to techniques used to gain insights into the human-centered design process. "What does it mean to design?" asked Love-Mickelson. "Design thinking is a set of tools and behaviors that reliably help teams come up with break-through ideas."

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Love-Mickelson prompted participants to elicit stories as a first step in the design process to understand human experiences and needs as opposed to gathering facts. From those stories, participants identified insights to fuel their thinking processes. They learned to apply specific constraints, such as being nonjudgmental to help them be more "generative in your ideas” and make their brainstorming more fruitful.

 

One of the 37 participants, a registered nurse at Children's Hospital, Amy Heaivet, said she was interested in bringing design thinking and innovation to health care. She found "going with the wilder idea" helpful during the group's brainstorming session. "It's much easier to scale back a bold idea" than pump up a safe one, says Love-Mickelson.

 

The techniques demonstrated by the facilitators showed workshop participants that quantity and boldness of ideas are important. Perpich artscience junior, James Harding, said, "When brainstorming, it's worth finding little details that seem useless because they can lead to important ideas."

 

Workshop participants were given nine minutes to built prototypes of their ideas, then tested them with others and refined their ideas further. Love-Mickelson said it's important to ask, "What am I trying to test—how it looks or how people interact with it?"

 

"It was rough to work under such a tight timeframe," said Scott Robertson, business consultant. "The goal should be to get it out as fast as possible because it is an experiment, so you can test it—not to get it right," Love-Mickelson said. "It allows us to get to know our users better." 

 

The Perpich artscience program is accepting applications for next year from current 10th and 11th graders from throughout Minnesota. For information or an application, contact Perpich admissions at admissions@pcae.k12.mn.us or 763-279-4168. For information about joining a future Design Thinking meet up go to http://www.meetup.com/Design-Thinking-MN

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