Design Thinking Experiment with Kids

It's good to be blogging after such a long time! It's been well over a year since my last blog - and what a year it has been. One of the most memorable experiences this year was the Design Thinking bootcamp at Stanford d.School. It has been the most impactful learning experience - ever. After d.School, I was also curious to know how children would absorb the concept of Design Thinking. I was sure that kids would like the prototyping phase, but I wasn't sure if they would understand the other phases - or did they even need to?

During a recent trip to India, the most interesting opportunity presented itself - children. My mother runs a private tuition at our home in Delhi. Many of the kids come from underprivileged families. I decided to try a "gift giving" activity with the kids. My mom and wife were my co-facilitators. The entire activity was a Design Thinking exercise as we had to improvise a lot. We had to make do WITHOUT a lot of the standard tools like whiteboards, tables, and most importantly - prototyping material.

The Gang

A typical gift-giving exercise is 90-minutes long. I stuck to that time limit, but we had over 40 kids. We split them into groups of 5 each, and every group had a leader and a "customer." Given the size of the group, I decided to get the group to "interview" the "customer" and produce one prototype per group. One quick note - some of these kids were very young (4-5 years) but very smart.

Given the size of the group, we cleared the room of all furniture and got the kids to sit in circles on the floor.

Developing Empathy

The goal of the exercise was to get the the groups to design a backpack for their "customer" by first interviewing them. I was pleasantly surprised to see how adept kids were at empathizing with their "customers." They were genuine with their questions and seemed to have an uncanny knack of honing into insights. The most remarkable part, however, was that they all took notes. I never gave them an "empathy guide".......just just did it themselves. 

The Prototyping Madness!

The best thing about Design Thinking is prototyping and the kids loved it!! The best thing about this exercise was that I didn't have any fancy prototyping material. We simply used newspaper. That didn't stop the kids from going berserk!

Testing with the "Customer"

At the end of the exercise all the teams tested their prototypes with their customers and then presented them to the rest of the group. The backpacks were superbly done and the presentations were heart-felt and genuine. 

To see these kids do much with so little and in such a short time made me realize how much time and money corporations actually waste in getting products to market! 

Conclusion

We loved every moment of this exercise and I plan to repeat it sometime soon. Kids are more genuine and hard working then adults - they actually get sh*t done. I wish companies would rely more on kids than on adults to get their stuff designed. :)