Motivate Design x Girls in Tech
How can technology and design partner to empower women entrepreneurs around the world?
Design workshop facilitation for GIT Gibraltar & GIT Malaysia, framework by Motivate Design, organizing by GIT local organizers, funding by GIT headquarters
What knowledge from design successfully transfers to innovation and entrepreneurship objectives?
Pictured here are some slides and talking points from the deck that organizes the two day session. The whole deck is also linked below.
These workshops were commissioned at a time when design thinking was still the container we tried to fill with all design knowledge. Since then the consensus is design thinking means 5 steps, and those steps aren’t actually helping achieve the outcomes design was hired to bring to life. I’ve preserved the original language of this presentation as a time capsule to show how far we’ve come.
thedesignsquiggle.com
So what does design thinking look like? Here’s a well loved diagram of the design process. Does this feel familiar? In my experience the design thinking process isn’t different from anything else we do in life. Design thinking just does a better job of encouraging the process, moving it along, understanding when it’s going well and when it’s not going well, and being able to guide others through difficulty.
When we build or create something, we’re influencing all the problems that are adjacent to the one we want to work on. Furthermore, what we think of as a problem worth solving might not be important to other people. When we talk about solutions, that word also suggests that a solution is complete. All creations exist in a complex world, and the finality of the word solution is just as artificial as our isolation of a problem. If you start talking about your designs as interventions that you make in response to issues, it frees you to work in the real world which is full of interconnected issues. Alternatively, you could look at an opportunity that seems to be underdeveloped, and develop an idea that inspires in others a longing for a response to that opportunity.
Here’s another well loved diagram of the design process. It’s made of straight lines, and it makes us feel calm and clear. I always like to show this second because I want people to image that inside that first diamond is a ton of messy thoughts, untidy lines. Inside the second diamond the lines find their tidiness and their long, straight clear way of being.
Nobody wants their work or their life to look like a scribble. We love straight lines, they’re so much more appealing. They inspire confidence and make us feel relaxed and in control. The problem is, the line never starts straight, no matter how much we wish it would. As you grow to be more experienced as a design thinker you’ll start to have a longing for the scribble phase, because that’s where you can say yes to different thoughts.
There’s one pretty advanced feature of design thinking that I like to emphasize for my clients, but typically they’re resistant to the idea. I’ll share it with you anyway in hopes that I inspire you to think in systems. See in the previous slide the labels at the end are problem and solution? We love to think of our ideas as solutions that solve a problem. It makes us look so smart and powerful. The trouble is, no problems are isolated. When we point at something and call it a problem, we’re artificially isolating it from its context. When we build a solution for the artificially isolated problem, we’re submitting a change into a whole system of related issues. .
