Digging Deeper into Design Thinking: Even More

During the second day of the LUMA Institute advanced workshop we got to really dig deep and fine-tune our use of the LUMA System. Each member of the workshop suggest a challenge they were approaching. Some challenges were related to planning meetings and some were around evaluating or growing initiatives within organizations. When we walked into the Dewey Learning Lab in the morning Bill had large planning papers, a deck of the LUMA cards and supplies at each table. We were asked to create a brief overview of the challenge and present it to the rest of the class. My design challenge was "creating and scaling a Design Thinking mindset" at my school. Many people at my school are excited about integrating design thinking into their classroom and using it at the organizational level to accelerate innovation. It's amazing to have the support to grow this mindset and the LUMA System across our school. To better prepare everyone to integrate and use DT, we are dedicating a full day in May to sharing the LUMA methods during a workshop for faculty. Once we were finished describing our challenge, each of the members of the class selected methods to tackle the challenge. We then explained our logic and thought process behind the selections. 

While it still needs to be tweaked, after about an hour of planning, here is where we landed. Always a good idea - we would start off with a Stakeholder mapping activity. Then moving onto some "looking" we would do a "what's on your radar" activity before we round the morning out with "experience diagramming" and a "rose, bud, thorn" activity. The afternoon will kick-off with some "statement starters," move to a "creative matrix" activity where we will "visualize the vote" and then either do a "concept poster" or "storyboarding" activity. Depending on time we will either do a "heuristic review"  or "critique." 

Notice that the sheet of paper (below) is broken down into "swim lanes" where each of the LUMA system areas are represented: Looking, Making & Understanding. Some of the methods we will use will require some prep work on my part like developing persona profiles and the rows/columns on the creative matrix. Through this workshop we will examine the "existing" state of the Upper School girls' experience and then the "preferred" state that bears in mind our new 80 minute schedule. 

While still being tweaked, initial plans for a faculty
workshop on Design Thinking using the LUMA system

I also got amazing advice from Mike, a Pittsburger in town for the workshop now working at Facebook. It was fascinating to talk to Mike about Facebook's growth, to Seth about his consulting work and Shannon about Environmental Charter School. I feel lucky to have collaborated with them and the amazing Bill Lucas. 

Mike giving some great advice on how to kick-off the DT workshop.

I would highly recommend the Advanced LUMA Institute workshop on becoming a certified practitioner if you want to extend your knowledge of design thinking in a deeper way after taking the public workshop. I feel more confident to leverage and select methods for problem sets a team may be approaching after participating in this session.