Design Thinking links strategy and execution to stimulate innovation. This article describes one aspect of the design thinking “Making Thinking Visible” —a user-friendly structure that overlaps the problems that divide people who are assigned to work in teams so that they can think, make decisions, and execute them together. This is a strategy for providing and receiving immediate evaluation and feedback.
The article is an updated version presented at AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) FutureHistory Conference, Chicago, 2004. The current version adapts academic studies for business.
Introduction
It was on the plane returning home from visiting Reggio Emilia schools, Italy for small children, that I was taken from the possibilities of what could happen if the documentation model I just witnessed fell into the hands of design students.
This happened when I developed the Teaching and Documentation Project curriculum at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco. Simply put, my students have documented their design and the teaching of the art / design project on the site next door.
Recently, I adapted this material from a higher level for those who are committed to the innovative flow of communication within a business. Documentation is a set of thinking and a method that balances strategic thinking with execution and reflects a new business environment that evaluates teamwork at the intersection of creativity / logic, right / left brain, and visual methods / text. Recognizing this link, CCA launches the first MBA in Design Strategy, proposed in the States in September 2008.
Business applications for perception of thinking
1. Communication at the forefront Impact Customer experience: testing products and services before the budget is spent on development, obtaining data at an early stage, while approaches can be changed; peer review allows innovative marketing skills
2. Cohesive Teams Innovate: introduces design thinking in accordance with the performance; supports unique cultures of different teams; deepens transparency in cross-functional teams; boosts morale by building and restoring confidence
3. More Direct Customer Feedback: Customer Sessions
4. Customer higher caliber and customer relations. Creating example-based processes demonstrates control over internal processes that reassure customers and clients.
history
A few snowy winters ago, I received a grant to visit Reggio Emilia in Italy, which Newsweek called one of the top 10 training systems in the world. Their students are between 3 months and 6 years old, while my clients are adults, so I was a little concerned about how good this would be. But it was Italy - there was no resistance.
Relevance hit my socks, and I came back with a burning question about the consequences for adults. How does this collaborative model, which provides image equivalence in combination with the spoken word — regardless of whether we really changed or even if our professional context is the dominant word / text — affects the survey of adults in business practice?
We reward conversation in education - and almost everywhere. However, children do not resort to speeches, as adults. In Italy, I saw systemically how communication happens when the “tyranny” of the spoken word is balanced by other means of knowledge. Italians call the documentation "second skin" of their schools.
The views of children on their work were visible everywhere. Italians say that children speak 100 languages, but adults only listen to one thing: spoken word. Again, adapting this material for business, an option to their question: what are the 100 languages of adult life?
Teachers taught at Reggio for decades without burnout. What's happened? The college, which returned to the States, said that the most difficult part again became a solo practitioner when she studied at a school full of teachers. Communication systems were absent.
Returning, I began to introduce documentation into my curriculum and felt instant relief: the general visual medium provided a powerful way to communicate along with the conversation, the dominant way of communication between teachers and managers. When creating visible diverse ideas and experiences, as well as the overall goals of the student group, reducing stress and collisions, the individual was calmed down or received a fresh (visual) foray to address them. I was looking forward to joining the classroom.
Implementing this advanced discovery session in an organization reflects this: shared visual environments raise morale, providing a basis for recognizing differences, publishing them, unraveling nodes, and implementing a more effective strategic design. This method replicates the laboratory's ecology for designing, testing, organizing, processing, baking, and enhancing ideas before implementation.
What is the documentation?
We usually view documentation as something ending at the completion of a project. The emerging definition of higher education, led in the States by the Harvard Higher School of Education, contains documentation as a powerful tool for making learning visible. Here the documentation is not something dying, but alive and responsive to the social context of the students. It promotes group thinking, making it visible.
Documentation is a trail of research that allows someone who has not been there to follow the thinking process, “reading” the presented images and reviewing the training, selects ideas, connects points and designs the next steps with greater clarity.
In the student example, on the first day of the semester we brainstormed the “documentation” on the blackboard. Students came up with: research, evidence of progress, non-empirical data intended for reading, understanding of who reads it, transfer of knowledge without the presence of a teacher.
It is important to emphasize this last distinction when coaching a team on this approach. The documentation is full of quick decisions based on the knowledge of the participants of the internal work and the rhythms of their culture, because no one knows about it better. The goal is for teams to absolutely use this method as their own, so that it is sustainable.
There were several levels of documentation. My students documented their students in their relatives in the community, I documented my students, and they documented each other. In some cases, my students students have documented. We all documented the objects created and the artifacts. Documentation took many forms: photos, video, drawing, diagrams, interviews, paper and pencil, audio.
Digital recording technology allows us to immediately review the process while the project still has the flexibility. We might revisit the topic again later, when the data might overwhelm, to remind us of earlier insights. In our case, students were the subject of documentation. educational projects: creating papier-mâché makeup, a blind coke test and one of the favorite buildings in the neighborhood.
Joint intelligence
Although each of us operates in the social sphere, this is not an area in which we do not need training. But business environments require us to become flexible, working together in cross-functional teams. My documentation curriculum was formulated with a continuing question: how to educate an “introvert” who creates and “extraverts” who is entrusted to collaborating, managing, leading and teaching teams?
Creating a mindset Visible facilitates interaction between groups and can interact with its subject group. 14 seminar students worked individually and united. As a jazz ensemble, he provided something rare: the rhythm of independence and interdependence is the opposite of the usual “presentation”, held as a group work. Accelerated individual training, providing opportunities to work through silos.
assessment
Creation of thinking The visible is based on a reflexive conversation between stakeholders (documentation subjects, documentation creators, process watchers and those who did not participate in any of these peers, managers, clients, and clients) on different to interpret a collection of common visual environments.
Although evaluation is part of any reference documentation, this makes this explicit. His deliberate visibility is gaining momentum, comparing and conducting live discussions. The more organic disciplines of the bridge and the diversity of views are involved as co-designers of the knowledge base being created. The manager, who knew her team well, told me when she “was amazed to see the many solutions” that they came up with. Attracting "head, heart and intestines," as the author Peter Cairo, as a rule, buys an assembly and today is a competitive advantage.
Shared visual environments resist melting, so people move faster through habitual (stuck) assessment bogs. As the participant said: “This naturally encourages busy listeners.” People get acquainted with each other in an inviolable form, therefore there is more trust for those who are outside our discipline and in usual ways of thinking and activity.
“Making Thinking Visible” has an unedited, internal aspect and an edited public side. In a safe context, he undoubtedly reveals the background to the survey — mistakes, mistakes, “do not go back there” - moving outside of cosmetics to study experience with essential meaning. It sounds simple, but several structures for accepting errors as a generative act do exist. The idea is to quickly, often and with others, quickly and quickly perform the same actions as the research topic. Commands and best practices begin. We began to acclimatize to start quickly, without fussing. Skateboarders do well in this.
Of the 5 senses, vision provides the greatest distance — a cool lens to return to the moment that we wished for never happened, paths left or “reworked” with ease and even humor to select learning. This enhances the flexibility of the assessment.
Future story
On the plane that flew home from a documentary document about the creation of the Visitor Institute at Harvard, I thought about what I heard there. One participant said that teachers here in the States care about their students as much as teachers in Reggio Emilia. Education is a complex problem all over the world. I am most familiar with what makes our context so - regardless of the age or context of the student.
Documentation is the method and mind for innovation. While originally designed to decide which child growing up as an adult may be an implication, it is essential for adults in professional business practice.
(c) 2008, Linda Yawen. Want to use this article in your e-journal or on a website? Of course, provided that all links are live, and include copyright and the lines below.
