Abstract
Skills in creativity are needed to meet the needs of today’s organizations, and design thinking is a process that one can learn to become more creative. Yet the diminishing exposure to and pursuit of humanities courses, which have traditionally developed these skills, has put pressure on business schools to fill the gap. This experiential learning exercise, Recasting the Door, is directed toward undergraduate students and presents an opportunity for students to develop and practice design thinking and creative problem solving, especially when situated in a course on creativity or innovation. In this exercise, students work in teams to develop a creative art installation that physically transforms the instructor’s office door symbolically or metaphorically to serve a new purpose. Using an open-ended design brief, students use idea generation, idea evaluation, prototyping, and collaboration to develop a human-centered solution. Then they critique their own and other teams’ installations.
In recent years, many popular press articles have emphasized the increasing importance of design thinking in business practice (Lombardi, 2005; Mootee, 2008; Wong, 2009; Wood, Whiting, & Stocks, 2011). A few of these articles have gone so far as to suggest that the Masters of Fine Arts will replace the Masters in Business Administration, a claim first made by Daniel Pink in his book A Whole New Mind (2005). While a drastic claim, the underlying logic that business leaders need to excel in innovation makes sense. Successful businesses engage in continuous innovation, a requirement for long-term viability in today’s turbulent environment. In fact, 7 out of 10 senior executives mentioned innovation as their top priority for growth in a recent Boston Consulting Group (BCG) report (Wood et al., 2011).
As evidence of the importance of innovation and creativity in today’s business context, numerous books discuss design thinking as a process to improve creativity in business. Three of the foundational works in this area include Roger L. Martin’s The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage (2009), Jeanne Liedtka’s and Tim Ogilvie’s Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Toolkit for Managers (2011), and Tim Brown’s Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation (2009). Similarly, several programs and workshops are offered on design thinking in business; for example, Stanford University offers a 3-day “Design Thinking Boot Camp: From Insights to Innovation.” Together, these resources offer support for the push to disseminate the practice of design thinking in response to today’s organizations’ creativity and innovation needs.
These programs and resources are geared to working professionals. There is a parallel need to provide educational support to help today’s students acquire design thinking skills. As undergraduate curricula have lost some flexibility with decreased space for humanities and liberal arts courses (Colby, Ehrlich, & Sullivan, 2011; Ferrall, 2011; Gilead, 2017)—courses that have been traditionally recognized for their ability to enhance critical thinking, communication skills, and an ability to be creative and “think outside the box” (Colby et al., 2011; Edelstein, 2010)—it is important to find ways to integrate fundamentally creative projects and exercises within business courses. In support of the increased need for exercises that cultivate creativity, numerous recent contributions have been made describing exercises that can be used toward these aims (Crowne, 2017; Hagen, Bernard, & Grube, 2016; Holbrook & Comer, 2017; Stock, Bucar, & Vokoun, 2017). In the sections that follow, I describe design thinking and then introduce an exercise to foster the development of design thinking skills.
Theoretical Foundation
Design thinking is a structured, yet iterative and cyclical, process used to solve ill-defined and ambiguous problems (Brown, 2009; Sheehan, Gujarathi, Jones, & Phillips, 2018). With the “human-centered” approach of design thinking, emphasis is placed on empathy—identifying with user experiences through observation, listening, creating, prototyping, and testing potential solutions and revisions to problems (Cross, 1982; Glen, Suciu, & Baughn, 2014; Zidulka, Davenport, & Low, 2015). Outcomes of the design thinking process include physical solutions, such as product design (Brown, 2009; Verganti, 2011); process-based solutions, such as service design (Brown, 2009); and intangible idea-based solutions, such as policy (e.g., Parker & Heapy, 2006) or business strategy development (e.g., Liedtka, 2010).
Typically, the design thinking process is conceptualized a series of four steps: problem identification, idea generation, testing and prototyping, and exploring feasibility (Brown, 2009; Liedtka & Ogilvie, 2011; Stanford, 2013). Each of these steps requires continuous focus on the user and involves quick feedback loops and an emphasis on visual thinking to conceptualize and communicate problems and solutions in a hands-on way to intentionally externalize knowledge (Carlgren, Rauth, & Elmquist, 2016; Schumacher & Mayer, 2018). The project described below is designed to offer students an opportunity to develop their creative confidence through practice in design thinking (Kelley & Kelley, 2012).
Learning Objectives
By completing this project, students will be able to
Identify the core elements of a design thinking brief
Explain the design thinking process
Implement the design thinking process to solve a problem
Critique the design thinking process as a problem-solving approach
Instructions for Running the Exercise: Recasting the Door
Overview
The exercise presented in this article, referred to as Recasting the Door, is constructed to bring together key practices of design thinking, while making use of its intrinsic alignment with experiential learning approaches (Glen et al., 2014; Zidulka & Mitchell, 2018). I have run this exercise three times in an undergraduate course on Creativity and Organization Innovation. In this course, this exercise serves as a primer for a semester-long applied design thinking project aimed at solving a real-world social problem of the students’ choice. I find that this shorter-term, more loosely constructed, and lighthearted activity gets the students more comfortable with the process before moving onto the more rigorous and lengthy endeavor.
First, it is presented as a “wicked problem,” as most design briefs are presented, in that it is ill-defined and ambiguous and that “solving” such a problem generally involves an iterative process that is a “messy, contingent combination of minds, things, bodies, structures, processes, and agencies” (Kimbell, 2012, p. 141). The students engage in an ongoing process of ideation and prototyping, testing solutions and solving problems as they arise in a collaborative setting. It is human-centered in that students are focused on the experience they want to create for the viewer. Table 1 shows the alignment of the exercise with the core elements of the design thinking process.
Design Thinking Elements in Recasting the Door.
Students are assigned to groups and given a design brief to transform the instructor’s office door. Each group signs up for a door installation time slot during the semester, in which they showcase their solution to the design brief. In their groups, students make use of design thinking tools to implement their solution. Step-by-step instructions are presented in Table 2.
Step-by-Step Instructions for Recasting the Door.
Logistics
Preparation
To prepare for this exercise, students are introduced to several design thinking tools. During the semester, my students are continually exposed to and learn a variety of design thinking tools via one of the course texts, 101 Design Methods: A Structured Approach for Driving Innovation in Your Organization (Kumar, 2013). Students are asked to draw from these tools during the course of this project. Most of the effort on applying them comes in the idea generation, prototyping, and installation planning and implementation phases, as the first steps of problem identification and understanding user needs are less complex than most real-world problems.
The instructor will need to
Ensure that the office door is ready for student installations—that is, that the surface is clean and free of any materials you would like to preserve.
Prepare to distribute the design brief (see Appendix A).
Plan an installation schedule (see Timing below).
Bring a schedule sign-up sheet.
Create a secure repository for completed critique/evaluation forms (see Appendix B; also available as a supplemental file) and a place to make evaluation forms readily accessible to students visiting the installation. I use a manila envelope with a slit cut into it to collect completed forms. I email the electronic version of the critique/evaluation forms to the students and also have some pre-printed blank forms posted on the wall by my door for students to fill out.
Materials Needed
Students are required to provide their own materials for the project, which may involve an assortment of materials, including, but not limited to, wrapping paper, construction paper, old plastic or cardboard containers, markers, stickers, tape, glue, buttons, pipe cleaners, magazine pages, photos, clay, and so on. Students are encouraged to use a variety of media and reuse household items otherwise destined for recycling or trash. From the experience of doing this project over time, and the nature of my particular door, which was a plastic laminated MDF door, best adhesives have been discovered: clear packing tape and scotch tape (duct tape was especially problematic as materials would fall off the door, and it would leave excessive glue deposits). These recommended adhesives may or may not hold true for your doors, and so students should test materials and be prepared to select only those that may be fully removed. Students will also need a sketchbook or journal for documenting their process and their perception of the experience in preparation for the debriefing process.
Team Size
While I have mostly conducted this course in class sizes of 35 or fewer students, if you elicit support from colleagues in the form of willingness to subject their office doors to decoration, the project could be scaled up a bit fairly easily. I have found teams of 2 to 5 students work best.
Timing
The semester needs to be divided into installation periods. I usually schedule installation on the day before a class meeting day and typically allow the installation to remain for a week. However, I could imagine shorter installation periods of 3 to 5 days working well, though shorter installation periods limit enrolled student viewing and evaluation time. Short installation periods also limit the opportunity for wider audience viewing. Students seem to be able to install their solution within the timeframe of a designated weekday. I also leave removal to be scheduled on a particular weekday, which can also be an installation day for the next group by asking groups to coordinate times of day with one another.
Students are reminded that other faculty members are nearby and use their offices to concentrate on writing and other activities, so quiet installation is appreciated. All materials should be removed and the door should be returned to “new” condition at the completion of their installation.
An unintended and, for me, desirable consequence of this project was that students learned where my office was located and were more likely to stop by for office hours. The familiarity with my office location and frequency of student visits improved the mentoring relationship and seemed to increase the lasting impact of the course. Some examples of past door projects are shown in Appendix C.
Instructions for Debrief
There are two avenues for debriefing the exercise. One involves the personal written journal/sketchbook entries that the students made throughout the project. The second involves an in-class debriefing discussion after all teams have participated in the project. Typically, I do both, by first collecting and reviewing the journals over a weekend between class sessions to survey general levels of documentation of the process and thoughts. I make notes of any journals that offer exceptional examples or perspectives I would like to highlight in class discussion. Then, after returning the journals to the students at the next class session, I engage in the in-class debriefing discussion. I have presented typical debriefing discussion questions that can be used for this process in Table 3. Notes to the instructor regarding these discussion questions and some of the typical responses to the debriefing questions are included in Appendix D.
Debriefing Recasting the Door Tied to Learning Objectives.
Conclusion
This exercise serves as an introduction to design thinking that helps to prepare students by building their creative confidence (Kelley & Kelley, 2012; Ulibarri, Cravens, Cornelius, Royalty, & Nabergoj, 2014). Via this exercise, I was able to increase student comfort with ambiguous problems and experimentation. Students were able to practice design thinking skills in a way that also generated conversation and interest in their work via the visible and public forum of the college hallway. Additionally, as mentioned, students were more engaged with me and were more likely to stop by my office, enhancing my ability to take a more active role in their academic journey. The exercise described here is one of many potential exercises that instructors can use to give students the opportunity to practice skills that will be highly appreciated by their future employers. I encourage instructors to modify the exercise and debriefing questions to express their own creativity.
Supplemental Material
Evaluation_Form_for_Critiquing_the_Recasting_the_Door_Installations – Supplemental material for Recasting the Door: An Applied Design Thinking Skill Building Exercise
Supplemental material, Evaluation_Form_for_Critiquing_the_Recasting_the_Door_Installations for Recasting the Door: An Applied Design Thinking Skill Building Exercise by April J. Spivack in Management Teaching Review
Footnotes
Appendix A
Appendix B
Appendix C
Appendix D
Acknowledgements
I thank the late Dr. J. Ben Arbaugh for his encouragement to pursue publication of this exercise, and also Dr. Joe Seltzer, Dr. Jane Schmidt-Wilk, and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions that greatly improved the article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
References
Supplementary Material
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