Tuesday, January 31, 2017

What's Your Style; Thinking, Doing, Feeling or...?

For several weeks I've had an idea percolating to frame Design Thinking as a learning style which combines feeling, thinking and doing in order to discover and solve problems. Today I found a web site by the New Jersey Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages/ New Jersey Bilingual Educators which had a one page handout entitled What does your preferred learning style mean? Much to my delight, the column headings were; Thinking, Doing, Feeling and Innovating. The footnote said it was adopted from Skip Downing's On Course Workshop.

Unfortunately, the link to the Learning Styles Inventory there was broken, but here is what the NJTESOL/NJBE web page showed:


Reframing this to the context of the Design Thinking process, the pieces are all there; Analysis Empathizing, Building and Testing and Reflection. I was disappointed that the Innovating column didn't integrate more of the items from the other three - are Innovators not also Thinkers and Doers and Feelers? I also disagree with the notion that Innovators would be "Uncomfortable with answers based on abstract theories, cold facts, hard data, emotion, or personal considerations" but perhaps thats because the context is academic rather than practical.

What do you think? As a Design Thinker, are we not seeking to be Feeling, Thinking and Doing as the situation demands?






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