Applying Design Thinking Tools in Classrooms

Design in the school
classrooms –
Applying Design tools to
improve quality of
education
Kshitiz Anand*
Director & Head of Operations (India Studio)

Jean Haag
Transcultural Design Masters Student

ICoRD, 8th January 2015

Summary
1.  Design needs to come out of its elitist image
2.  Need to implant the value of design from a young age
3.  Quality of education has to be improved across the country
4.  Can we apply the tools of design to primary school education
TCD India Studio / ICoRD/ 08 January 2015 / Kshitiz Anand, Jean Haag

My story of design

By luck to passion to vision
Story of Design
2015
no design know design ?
2001
design student with design students
in a design school heading a design school

14 years into design, around the world, 1 conclusion

Design to school classrooms

Can Design Thinking help ?

Adopt a system-based thinking approach

Keeping in mind each stakeholder

Design Intervention points

Existing classrooms and education environment

Interactions in the classrooms

What design tools do we use ?
Designerly ways of knowing / learning

Values and benefits
•  No idea is a bad idea and it
encourages everyone to
participate
•  Generate many ideas by
promoting Divergent thinking
•  Doing things with time constraints
by having a deadline
•  Learn to group together ideas and
build onto others’ ideas
•  Encourage to speak up
Brainstorming
Design Tools / Designerly ways of knowing and learning

Values and benefits
•  Promote drawing and doodling
•  Artistic communication is key
towards overall child development
•  Take notes by writing keywords,
making doodles, illustrations,
represented by arrow marks to
give a sequential processing of
information.
•  It also allows the information to be
remembered for a longer time.
Visual Note Taking

Values and benefits
•  Make textbooks information easy
to grasp.
•  Understanding Visual Order and
fundamentals of typography
facilitate the learning process by
identifying what information is
important and needs to be
consumed first.
•  Helps in ‘revision’ of knowledge
during examination
Visual Order and Information Processing

Values and benefits
•  Building the ability to ask right
questions
•  The teacher assumes ignorance
for a certain topic
•  Help the children build the answer
by themselves and extract
knowledge out of it.
•  Encourage children to ask
questions from early age.
•  Playing the ‘Why’ game
Socratic Questioning

Values and benefits
•  It inﬂuences their language
development and story
comprehension at a young age
•  Provide appropriate occasions to
play with language, while gaining
an appreciation of the sounds and
meaning of words
•  Enhances self confidence to be
able to present to larger audience
Storytelling

Values and benefits
•  Kids actively generate and
capitalize knowledge
•  Build a sense of competition to
push them forward
•  More likely to develop strategy
elaboration, leadership and
teamwork skills
Gamification

Values and benefits
•  Learning through hands-on
activity (prototyping) is more
appealing for the kids
•  Equip classes with broad set of
stationery and other materials that
would help children prototype.
•  Paper and cardboard, different
pens and pencils, raw materials
(clay, wood, fabric, plastic), paint,
scrap items (water bottles broken
household items).
Rapid Prototyping

Values and benefits
•  Avoid focuses on accumulating
raw knowledge to do away with
rote learning.
•  The curriculum should not be the
main motivator for the teacher
•  This would allow knowloefge to
be retained beyond its short life
span as is today
Critical Thinking

Did we try these out ?

Design tool and methodologies driven
work at Happy Horizons Trust

Workshops in schools across India

Workshops with kids at conferences
and events

Partner with organizations like
Teach for India (Pune, Mumbai, Delhi,
Bangalore), Mantra for Change
(Bangalore), EduGenie (Guwahati)

Conclusion

Question the process of learning and what is
learning itself
Conclusion

Look at the stakeholders involved in the learning
process
Conclusion

Rethink the space in which the learning happens
and knowledge is delivered
Conclusion

Impart education that looks at overall
development of children
Conclusion
•  Student’s cognitive ability: Brainstorming, Critical Thinking, Socratic
Questioning
•  Student’s learning skills: Rapid prototyping, Gamification,
Understanding Visual order and Information Processing, Visual Note
Taking
•  Student’s personality development: Storytelling, Presentations

Future Work

Taking the paper forward
Conclusion
•  Design Thinking workshops in schools through the Happy Horizons
Trust
•  Partner with more schools across India
•  Promote design thinking from a young age
•  Training of teachers to be able to conduct sessions on their own and
use the tools it in their teaching

THANK YOU

Kshitiz Anand
Director & Head of Operations (India Studio)
k.anand@lecolededesign.com
[twitter] @kshitiz
[m] + 91 95 35 20 68 28
[skype] kshitiz.a

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