It’s the end of our class in the d.school – Transformative Design.

We held the presentations on Monday. Today we shared feedback – it amounts to a great concise commentary on the strengths of the d.school process and design thinking, and more generally on studio-based/project-based interdisciplinary learning.

What we like:

• listening to others, leaving oneself behind, getting out of the classroom on field research and ethnography
• teamwork where everyone has something to offer, because everyone is an expert in some way
• sharing – where the social skills of getting on with others are as important as technical expertise and domain-based knowledge
• copying good ideas rather than being anxious about ownership and proprietary knowledge
• empathy – experiencing someone else’s world
• the challenge of documenting and representing someone else’s world – the importance of visualization, of using media well
• getting on with things – building prototypes, with less emphasis on anticipation and preliminary analysis designed to get things right first time
• being open to change and modification, getting things wrong as well as right, learning from failures
• embracing the flow of process as much as end product
• process as improvisation
• collaborative critique – regularly sharing progress with other teams and teaching teams