Iryna Karaush, Wilson School of Design, Kwantlen Polytechnic University
Thomas Carey, B.C. Association of Institutes and Universities
NationTalk, an Indigenous newswire service, recently posted this news item about a collaborative project involving the Wilson School of Design at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, the Tsawwassen First Nation Farm School (both in Richmond BC) and IBM Canada’s Design Studio (Markham ON). (The NationTalk post also included content from a post on Kwantlen’s own News feed).
“Students in the Fall 2018 semester of DESN 2004 were coached in Design Thinking by course instructor Iryna Karaush of the Wilson School’s Product Design faculty. The course project applied Design Thinking to investigate future opportunities for sustainable growth at the Tsawwassen First Nation Farm. The ethnographic research and observation took place on the farmland where students engaged in experiential leaning and enjoyed the undeniable charisma of the farm’s inhabitants.
at text: students working on Tsawwassen First Nations Farm
To explore Design Thinking as a tool for innovation in other workplace contexts, the students undertook a Case Study of IBM’s implementation of Design Thinking –as both a team design tool and a strategic company-wide approach. IBM Canada provided access to their online module for IBM Enterprise Design Thinking Practitioners, a learning resource which over 150,000 IBMers have completed. This exploration of the transfer of student capabilities into a workplace context provided an authentic work-integrated learning experience within the in-course project assignment.”
In this post, we’ll explain the instructional design and rationale – especially around the way we could integrate concepts of Employee-Driven Workplace Innovation into a Design Thinking course. We wanted to see how existing pedagogies for Design Thinking might be extended to situate Design Thinking in a broader workplace context and to build an understanding of the multiple roles which employees might undertake in a Design Thinking project. In our next post, we’ll discuss what the students – and the instructors – learned from this pilot project.
The educational context was a new course offering in Design Thinking and Innovation, targeting students from outside the Design School. There are now multiple approaches to teaching Design Thinking to “non-Designers” whose primary career interest is not in Design, from early work about the “mindshifts” required for Design Thinking to more recent comparative studies of formal and informal learning and the obstacles that learners commonly encounter. In that context, the base pedagogy approach for this course followed a model that combines Design Thinking as a structure for user-centred design with specific additional methods to foster creative thinking.
The setting for the course Design Thinking project contained several unfamiliar aspects for the students: the Tsawwassen Farm School is a program for Sustainable Agriculture with a very applied focus based in an Indigenous community within the greater Vancouver metropolitan area. Students could apply some of their understanding of educational institutions but were also forced to rethink some of their preconceptions and look at the situation with fresh eyes.
The Design Thinking process deliverables were focused on activities for What is, What if, What wows and What works (although due to time limitations the low-fidelity prototypes generated by the students to test What works were assessed for feedback by the Farm School managers rather than undergoing multiple prototype-test iterations).
This was one of the constraining aspects which positioned these projects in the Directed Innovation category of workplace innovation – initiatives with prescribed roles and boundaries. As another example of pragmatic constraints on the Design Thinking process, the students identified challenges in collaboration with the Farm School managers but had limited access to Farm School students or customers for the retail operation.
[A more comprehensive exploration of these issues, reporting on all our 2018 pilot projects at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Workplace Innovation as a Graduate Attribute, can be found in our upcoming book chapter Carey, T., Dastur, F., & Karaush, I. (2019). Workplace Innovations and Practice Futures. In Challenging Future Practice Possibilities (pp. 229-242). Brill Sense Publishers.]