Design thinking has shown promise in pedagogy, but can it work in a department meeting, or other more bureaucratic settings? The lessons learned by participants in a recent design-thinking workshop at Stanford University’s d.school suggest that it can.
Empathy can make a difference. Madlen Simon, the associate dean of academic affairs and outreach in the School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at the University of Maryland at College Park, has found design thinking’s emphasis on empathy to be useful in working with colleagues. Recently she ran a faculty-senate subcommittee to devise a new policy for handling student grievances against faculty. When the subcommittee submitted the new policy for approval, faculty members attacked it; the issue of the proper use of “reading day” between the end of classes and the exam period aroused fierce resistance. “Surprisingly, this seemingly mundane thing raised a lot of passion,” she says.
Ms. Simon started a series of conversations with stakeholders “to try to ferret out the trigger points that made people anxious and emotional,” she says. Those conversations led to a broader reconsideration of the policy by the committee, which found that the larger problem wasn’t the grievance process but uncertainty over professors’ obligations to students. Ms. Simon’s exercise in empathy enabled the committee to “morph this thing from, ‘Here’s a way for students to get their complaints dealt with,’ to ‘Here’s what students can reasonably expect, and if these things aren’t met, here’s what we do about it.” The second take on the policy was approved and enacted in the spring of 2016.
Crazy ideas sometimes aren’t so crazy. Suggesting far-fetched notions goes against the grain for many academics, who have built their careers on knowing what they’re talking about. For Scott A. Wible, an associate professor of English at the University of Maryland at College Park, team brainstorming during the design-thinking workshop was inhibited at first. But the wild ideas came out eventually. For example, how might one motivate the graduate students Mr. Wible teaches at Maryland to take more risks in their own teaching? How about, as someone on his design team suggested, a trip to Disneyland or a retreat in Hawaii?
If I keep asking questions, I’ll get to a point where there’s something in there that I can spin out into a workable idea.
“I had that knee-jerk ‘Nah, we’d never do that,’” he says. But the core idea of incentivizing risks stuck with him. “There’s some promise here,” he says. “If I keep asking questions, I’ll get to a point where there’s something in there that I can spin out into a workable idea.”
Perfect isn’t always ideal. Quick and dirty are not values academe typically embraces. A group of undergraduates from the University of Alabama at Birmingham attended the University Innovation Fellows program at the d.school in 2015, and returned to campus fired up to create a maker space, according to Molly M. Wasko, their adviser, and the associate dean for research, innovation, and faculty success in the Collat Business School.
When the project was in the hands of the faculty — herself included, Ms. Wasko says — it went nowhere. “We had a very traditional model of think it, plan it, get it perfect,” she says. “Let’s spend $100,000 on the prototype and then launch it.” But administrators expressed concerns over students using tools unsupervised. There was no space considered suitable. “We just couldn’t see a clear pathway forward,” she says, until she and Alan W. Eberhardt, a professor of biomedical engineering and a fellow adviser on the project, turned it over to the students.
Despite her own experience with design thinking, she found it difficult when the students’ plans didn’t seem practical — for example, creating a “Maker Day” on the campus quad with only two months to plan it. “You just want to shake them and say, ‘Don’t you realize there’s something called reality?’” she says. “I had to learn how to say, ‘Sounds awesome. How can I help?’”
The students persuaded the dean of libraries to give them space. The university provided $10,000 to buy three 3-D printers, but the students had to figure out how to sustain the operation financially. Ms. Wasko says she and Mr. Eberhardt “had many fretful little coffee talks” about the project. “We’re going to have an opening day of a maker space that I’m the faculty sponsor for, and it’s going to look like something we set up in a garage?” she says. “Yes, actually, that’s exactly what we’re going to do, and we’re going to see how it works.” The maker space opened in February 2016, and now supports itself by doing 3-D printing for other students.
Lee Gardner writes about the management of colleges and universities, higher-education marketing, and other topics. Follow him on Twitter @_lee_g, or email him at lee.gardner@chronicle.com.
