Action to help those engaged in
planning and carrying out disciplined innovation. It describes a
methodology that has been developed in the fields of service and
interaction design.
1.The need for new designs
New conditions and broader and
more complex learning goals, call for
a developmental response, drawing
on design methods that have been
created to develop solutions to
urgent problems.
2. The discipline of design
Design thinking processes combine empathy for the
context of a problem, creativity in the generation of
insights and solutions, and rationality in analysing and
fitting various solutions to the problem context. They
can be powerful ways of creating new possibilities in
education
3. The design methodology
The ‘triple diamond’ methodology has
been used to create and scale
innovation in sectors from
manufacturing to mental health. The
methodology can be adapted to the
design of any product or experience -
what it initiates is a structured process
of breaking down a problem, seeing it
from new perspectives, and building up
a solution of constituent tools and
practices
Stimulate
Defining the problem and stimulating innovators to respond
Begin with a process of stimulating awareness of a problem,
for example a case for change that set out why schools
need to change to enable more engaging learning.
Incubate
Incubating solutions
Once you have defined the problem and
created the conditions for innovators to
respond, the next step is to explore, generate
and evaluate solutions to the problem. This is
known as the incubate phase. A chicken’s egg
is only fully formed once it has undergone
incubation. Turning ideas into effective
practices requires a similar process to occur.
The enquiry questions developed in the
stimulate phase are further examined and
challenged this incubation phase
The incubation phase starts by learning more
about the background and context of the
focus of enquiry, in particular the relevant
people involved. The aim of this step is to
explore the problem in more detail,
generating insights and ideas of
opportunities. It will begin with a good
understanding of what previous research has
to tell us about the issue
Methods for
understanding the
challenge and
context
Undertake a horizon scan
Use ethnography
Determine available
resources through audits
and activities mapping
Methods for
defining what you
have found
Utilise conceptualising frameworks
• Create personas
Methods for prompting ideas
Listen to disrupters
Learn from related worlds
Methods for testing and
generating new ideas
Role-playing
Paper prototyping
Methods for refining an idea
Create a storyboard
Conduct open behavioural simulation
Evaluate
Methods
Polling
Surveys
Interviews and
focus groups
Analysis of existing data
Action research
Scale
Finally, achieving real scale with new
practice is often not possible without
changing the systems in which
practice exists. Students, teachers and
schools operate within many-layered
systems, and all of these layers have
an impact on behaviour. Parent and
employer expectations, system
metrics, school regulations and
government policies are all important
parts of these systems. As schools
develop new findings about which
practices are most beneficial for
engagement and achievement of their
students, they can work together to
influence their system conditions,
creating better conditions for other
schools to be able to develop similar
practices.