2021-2022, CDM Design Thinking

> [!summary]+ Summary > This page explains a workshop designed to practice design thinking as part of a workshop series for promoting digital literacy/fluency with university faculty. I provide background on the design, highlight the central digital tool used, and provide some reflective notes. (See the bottom of this page for the results of this workshop.) # Communicating with Digital Media (CDM): Priming the Imagination **Delivery details:** Date: Fall 2021, Spring 2022, and Fall 2022 Target audience: University faculty Delivery format: Remote/Zoom Duration: 90 minutes ## About the workshop Of the CDM workshop series, this was the first planned and delivered workshop. In the conceptualization of the workshop series, **design thinking** was considered a fundamental aspect to engaging faculty with [Adobe Creative Cloud](https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/buy/students.html) apps and ultimately bolstering their digital fluency to use these tools in their teaching and research. The workshop had the following description and learning objectives. ### Description > Have you found that you have the spark of an idea for creating something digital to enhance your teaching and/or student activity, but aren't sure what to do next? Are you finding that your mind is taking you in multiple directions as to what the content should be, how it can be presented, how it can be created and so on? You're probably at the start of a great idea, but not yet ready to identify a digital tool and begin to prototype. In this 'roundtable' primer workshop, you're invited to engage with LAI experts with expertise in communications, media and learning design to begin to narrow the scope of your idea, shape it with digital media and setup a foundation for participating in other workshops in the Communicating with Digital Media series focused on a single Adobe Creative Cloud tool. ### Learning objectives 1. Practice empathy and define a current teaching reality. 2. Examine insights and create themes from observations of student behaviors and needs. 3. Compile observations, insights and brainstormed ideas into a plan for the second phase of a design thinking methodology – ideation. During this workshop we worked through 3 activities as a group. - Activity #1 — Paired empathy interviews - Activity #2 — Establishing themes, insights and how might we - Activity #3 — Brainstorming as a group ### Workshop goal **The goal was for participants to flesh-out something that they might want to create for students.** (Remember, the target audience were faculty.) Some ideas could be a video, a podcast, an infographic, a series of worksheets, a course website, or something else. Rather then guiding participants to just technically do something, we wanted to teach them to slow down and think about what they wanted to create, what it needed to address, what were the appropriate tools, and how might multiple tools fit together to get the best result. ## Using a digital whiteboard: Miro To guide the process, I designed the workshop to use a digital whiteboard called [Miro](https://miro.com/). (This is an infinite whiteboard that offers a [free account to education users](https://help.miro.com/hc/en-us/articles/360017730473-Education-plan).) In here I created 1 whiteboard with 2 parts and focused the discussion around a single question. For this example, the question used was, "*What is something you learned about your students in the context of virtual learning during the pandemic?*" The idea was to use current context to frame any idea/solution for a digital teaching/learning product. ![[CDM-Design-Thinking-1.png]] After discussing and working through each activity, we concluded with a single storyboarding activity. This could be done together if people had similar ideas, individually, or with a member of the workshop staff. We were only looking for a start. ![[CDM-Design-Thinking-2.png]] ## 🎯 Results This workshop was repeated multiple times but struggled in the immediate aftermath of COVID-19. The restriction to online delivery made participant engagement in team difficult and most participants were either burned out with online technology or resistant to learning something new (like Miro). Still, participants reported enjoying thinking about design from a high level. Participation was around 5, which was in alignment with the average for departmental workshops. If doing this again, I would do it in-person and would use paper, pens, whiteboard, markers, and use little constructs made from [LEGOS](https://www.designorate.com/using-lego-serious-play-as-a-design-thinking-tool/).