The technique of “design thinking” is a solution-based strategy to drawback solving and includes 5 steps: rapid prototyping empathize, define, ideate, prototype and check.
Diane Levitt, senior director of K-12 schooling at Cornell Tech, conducts a design thinking workshop with neighborhood members and college students in the Milstein Program in Technology and Humanity.
On Feb. 20, Diane Levitt, senior director of K-12 training at Cornell Tech, visited campus for a design considering workshop with neighborhood members and college students within the Milstein Program in Technology and Humanity. Participants discovered how you can work as a crew to create rapid prototypes, in an try to solve real-world issues.
Levitt, who works with particular person schools and the brand new York City Department of Education’s CS4All initiative, teaches this workshop to educators and college students of all ages. A foundation of laptop coding, the design pondering process helps teams suppose by way of advanced problems by reframing them in a human-centric manner.
Throughout the Cornell workshop, groups worked in teams of three or 4 with three cards defining a “user,” a “task” and a “constraint.” Levitt explained that one in all an important elements of design thinking is to first understand and empathize along with your person, so as to tailor options to their wants. The following step was to use the user’s needs to the task they have been given, whereas considering the constraints positioned upon them.
Teams then spent five minutes brainstorming concepts, discussing their ideas and then rating them by creativity and affect. They then selected the ideas deemed the most creative and impactful to move to the prototyping part. Using primary workplace supplies, plus recycled and different supplies, the groups then made mock-ups of their solutions. Finally, the teams shared their prototypes and their thinking course of behind their creations.
While at first the tasks seemed daunting, the groups rapidly set to work to come up with options. One group acquired “mothers” as their person card, “build a home” as their task and “made out of glass” as their constraint. The group determined to interpret “building a home” as house renovations and targeted on their user’s needs by devising methods to use glass to child-proof a home. For more information on rapid prototyping review take a look at our own web site. They imagined durable, shatterproof glass stove covers and partitions to stop young children from getting into certain areas of the house.
Another group – tasked with “midlife disaster fathers,” “a way to take a seat up straight” and “waterproof” – thought up a wearable contraption with a remote control that may enable relations to send gentle reminders to prompt dad to take a seat up straight.
Teams picked from an assortment of objects including pipe cleaners, plastic containers, rapid prototyping containers, pom-poms and clothes pins to create their typically, whimsical prototype designs. After a brief dinner break, the teams presented their designs.
“I see computer science as a possibility to assist promote equity. That’s actually the reason I do this work,” Levitt said. “For Cornell Tech, teaching pc science to all college students is a social justice mission.

