Teaching Design Thinking...

…with Gen-AI.

Hello all. Welcome to the 110th edition of TEPS Weekly! 

In October 2022, the CBSE introduced ‘Design Thinking and Innovation’ as an optional skill subject from grades 6-12. This is based on the recommendation in the NEP 2020 to integrate design thinking across educational stages. And now, the advancements in generative AI tools like ChatGPT have opened up new avenues of using design thinking in schools. 

So, what is design thinking?

Design thinking is a human-centred approach to solving social problems in a creative and innovative way, involving a deep interest in understanding the people for whom we’re designing solutions. It requires us to follow five steps: empathise, define, ideate, prototype, test. This is what it looks like in a classroom: 

• Step 0 – Choose a Problem: The teacher chooses an age-appropriate but ill-defined real-world, social problem that lacks a single or obvious solution. 

• Step 1 – Empathise: The teacher presents students with the problem, and students participate in empathy-building activities to understand the people who will finally use and benefit from the solution they create – their experiences, their motivations and their needs. 

• Step 2 – Define: The teacher facilitates discussions and debates that help students think through and write a clear problem statement – one that keeps the human being at the centre and defines the need of the user.

• Step 3 – Ideate: The teacher leads brainstorming sessions so that students can come up with all possible ideas with a focus on quantity and not quality. Next, they evaluate the ideas, keeping in mind the user and the exact problem, filtering out the ones that can and cannot be used

• Step 4 – Prototype: Groups of students work separately to come up with a detailed plan to create a prototype of their solution – which could be a physical object, a service, an app or a scheme to help the users. The teacher gives them thinking and discussion tools to facilitate smoother discussions and come to a consensus.

• Step 5 – Test: Students test their prototype with the users to receive feedback to improve the product. Once feedback is received, students decide which step of design thinking they need to go back to – Do they need to define the problem differently? Do they need to change the idea completely? Do they need to change only a few aspects of their prototype?

How can Gen-AI help us with using design thinking in the classroom?

• Identifying a relevant problem: Design thinking requires a social problem that does not have an obvious solution. Such a problem is hard enough to come up with, and additionally, it must be relevant to students, to their immediate environment or to a community they care about. That’s not all! The complexity of the problem and the required skills must align with the students' prior knowledge and abilities, and students must be able to realistically research the problem and generate ideas. Lastly, it must be aligned with the requirements of the school curriculum. Identifying a relevant problem on all these parameters is probably one of the most important steps for the teacher, and generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini can help a teacher research and craft the problem in just the right way.

• Roleplaying users for research and empathy: Step 1 requires students to empathise with the final users – but in a school setting, it is often impossible for students to interact with the users. For example, if the users are physically challenged youth looking for employment, students may not be able to conduct empathy-building exercises with them within their school. In such cases, generative AI tools can, for example, take on the role of a physically challenged youth and answer interview questions posed by the students. They can also generate user personas to help students understand the users’ economic and social backgrounds, goals, motivations and challenges. Of course, there is no substitute to talking face-to-face with a person to build empathy, but in cases when it is not possible, generative AI can play a useful role.

• Synthesising research data: Step 2 requires students to define the problem clearly. This requires students to look for patterns in and summarise the findings from the empathy-building exercises in Step 1, and use those to frame a clear, human-centred problem statement. This is not easy for students to do, and generative AI can help by pointing out some patterns, by providing templates for problem statements, or in general acting like a thinking partner. Ideally, the teacher must play this role, but when there are different groups of students in a large classroom, generative AI can be of great assistance.

• Acting as a brainstorming partner: Step 3 requires students to brainstorm ideas for the solution and then filter them. Generative AI can serve as a powerful brainstorming partner – it can generate a large quantity and diversity of ideas based on prompts, suggest unconventional connections or analogies, help overcome creative blocks by offering different angles and build upon ideas suggested by students. Once there is a bank of ideas, generative AI can provide insights into the advantages and challenges associated with each idea, suggest metrics to score the ideas on and even assist in scoring the ideas on these metrics. Of course, students shouldn’t outsource the brainstorming and filtering completely to generative AI – the ideas and metrics suggested by AI should serve as a starting point for debates and discussions and not the ending point.

• Creating visual prototypes: Step 4 requires students to create prototypes of their solutions. Generative AI is especially useful when the prototype requires resources beyond simple stationery and items already available in the school. For example, if students design a low-cost water filter, they can give a prompt like : “A small plastic bottle with layers of sand, charcoal, and cotton. It should have a tap at the bottom.” AI generates an image showing the prototype and helps students visualise their idea without physical materials. Similarly, students who have come up with an app idea but don’t know how to code can now use paid AI tools to quickly develop a prototype app with simple prompts. AI can also generate multiple versions or variations of a design idea.

• Providing initial feedback: Step 5 requires students to test their prototype with the users to receive feedback. Generative AI could be used to roleplay how different users might interact with a prototype to get early feedback or try out certain situations. However, we must keep in mind that it cannot take the place of real user testing.

All schools may not have the time to have separate design thinking lessons in their timetable. In such cases, schools can integrate design thinking into their academic subjects. For example, in a History class, students can use design thinking principles to answer a question like: Why is this monument important, and how can it be preserved better? Similarly, in a Science class, students can answer a question like: What can we do to improve air quality around our school and homes?

We at Things Education have conducted design thinking courses for over 1000 students and trained teachers across three states in facilitating design thinking in their classrooms. If you’d like to discuss a customised design thinking student curriculum or teacher professional development programme for your school, reach out to us at +91 9898469961 or info@things-education.com.

---

If you found this newsletter useful, please share it.

If you received this newsletter from someone and you would like to subscribe to us, please click here.

Edition: 4.17