ALISE16: Pre-Conference Workshop: Education to Innovate

This morning I attended a really interesting, useful and different workshop at the ALISE conference entitled "Education to Innovate" (or Envisioning our information future and how to educate for it). The background efforts for this session began in January 2015 at a forum. See Http://infofuture.simmons.edu (funded in part by IMLS). Slides from this ALISE workshop and content created during the workshop will be added to that site. Our session this morning was conducted by a team, with lot so interaction and takeaways (many of which are still rumbling around my head and are not below). My hope is that these notes might prompt you to learn more about design thinking.

The workshop's main goal was to explore design thinking principles and processes that can be used for reenvisioning our courses and curriculum.  We were tasked and pushed to rethink the familiar more deliberately in order to generate innovative ideas for change.  We were provided a number of tools and processes, which we got to test out.  All of them are guides for making observations and insights.  They included:

• Journey map - where to look?  The journey map (an IDEO tool) charts the experience of a user through time and across place.
• AEIOU - activities, environments, interactions, objects and users - what are you looking at?
• Look-ask-try - how to look?
• Pain points - can be explicit or latent (unrecognized by the user)
• Design principles - the attributes that a solution needs to have to respond effectively to the identified pain points.

The sweet spot for something to be innovative, it needed to get desirable, feasible and viable. (IDEO)

When we design we need to empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test and repeat.

Concept poster contains:

• Background and insights - pain points, design principles
• Basic concepts - description, functional benefit, emotional benefit 
• Key assumptions - desirability, feasibility, viability 

Throughout the workshop, each table turned its attention to a course, including:

• Describing the anatomy of a course.
• Putting ourselves in the shoes of the student. (In the real world, we would need to take in account numerous stakeholders.)

We were asked to frame the problem - how might we...? - and then design a possible solution.  We were asked to consider the design principles in relation to the problem.  In addition to:

• Go far! Go for wild ideas.
• Stay close - "break fixedness" - SIT - systematic innovative thinking

There was a quick mention of the IDEO's guidelines for brainstorming from "10 Faces of Innovation"

Interesting idea of having students do their "plan of study" as part of their introductory courses, after interviewing professionals in the field and talking to their advisor?  Perhaps also have them attend a career fair, where they can hear from professionals talk about their careers?

Design Thinking for Libraries, http://deaignthinkingforlibraries.com - three parts freely accessible.