Say What?

Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel 1563 

Last week I was given the unique opportunity to observe the K-12 Lab's Design Thinking seminar first hand. It was a terrific experience and great refresher. While there I photo documented nearly the whole process, including the karaoke bits. (no, I'm not sharing...)

Watching the teaching of Design Thinking and actually doing it are very different things, of course. But something else occurred to me which I think bears some further scrutiny;

There seem to be a lot of different ways of describing the process;

Expressions of Design Thinking

Some of these bear resemblance to each other but in terms of helping the neophyte Design Thinker understand the framework, they leave a lot to be desired. Over the next few days I'm going to try and get to the heart of the matter.

It's been said that a good reporter covers five things about a story; Who, What, Why. When and Where. In the context of Design Thinking - or any learnable skill, there are several steps to mastery. Bloom called them levels of learning.

Blooms's Taxonomy

They parallel the activities in Design Thinking's phases;

Both Bloom and Design Thinking are fundamentally about developing and expressing creativity.

Other descriptions of DT emphasize methods, tools, or skills. They are all about finding an area of overlap between Business Viability, Technical Feasibility and Filling Human Needs.

The Hasso Platner Institute's View

With all this commonality underpinning the details, why all the verbal confusion (babble)?