In essence, design based thinking is a human-centred approach to design that draws on design toolkits to solve problems.  It’s an iterative approach typically presented in a step wise process.  In practice the steps can occur simultaneously and often involve moving backwards and forwards through the process. The key steps/stages of design thinking include defining the problem, researching, forming ideas, prototyping and testing.  The first step is define the challenge or problem that you want to address.

The first step is to define a problem of challenge. To help identify the challenges that will be the focus of the workshop we’ll first consider some of the key problems we face in medical education.  There are various ways that you can so this, the approach we’re taking to help with this is to use ‘hope and fear’ cards with images to help inspire participants to express their concerns and objectives in relation to a problem in medical education.  The images are designed to help serve as metaphors for hopes and fears and to stimulate thinking and encourage thinking differently.

Each participant in invited to take 5 minutes to pick a card that resonates with a hope or fear that they have for a project, issue or challenge.  You can write down a few words on the card that summarise your fear.  We’ll then do the same for hopes and then reflect, discuss and share in groups.  As we work through the workshop you might also want to review these hopes and fears and add to them or remove them.  If the cards don’t articulate one of your hopes or fears you can jot down your thought on a post-it note.

The next step is to define your challenge, do this on a post-it note.  One approach to presenting your challenge is to start with ‘How can we ….’.  Keep the challenge fairly short, you’ve only got a post-it note.  We’ll then collect all of the challenges and collectively review and identify those that most resonate with each of us.  The ones with the most votes will then form the focus for the rest of the workshop.

Resources: You can download the set of Hopes And Fears Cards that we created for this workshop.  The Policy Lab also have a set that you can also download and use.

Next – Discovery – understanding your challenge

Image credit – “Irma’s White Head” flickr photo by nlafferty  shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license