Design Thinking is a human-centred approach to problem solving, meaning that it revolves around meeting the needs of the people who require solutions.  The process consists of five phases (Dam & Teo, 2024): 

  1. Empathize – At this stage, the designer collects quantitative and qualitative data and considers both to gain a robust understanding of target users’ needs.
  2. Define – Once user needs are established, the designer can define the problem.  In real life, problems are not always well-defined.  For this reason, this stage may be revisited at any time, as user needs are better understood, to revise the problem.
  3. Ideate – The designer generates ideas to solve the problem.
  4. Prototype – A solution is fleshed out.
  5. Test – The prototype is tested for efficacy.

This process is non-linear and iterative.  Rather than follow the steps sequentially, any phase can be revisited to improve upon the solution (Dam & Teo, 2024).  However, the intent is to create working protypes early so that they can be tested and learned from (Belling, 2020).  The approach encourages the designer to understand users, challenge assumptions, and redefine problems with the end goal of improving products (Dam & Teo, 2024). 

Alignment

The Big Ideas of our Design unit are “variety and balance are vital to healthy eating” and “fad diets can negatively impact physical and mental health.”  In Health Promot J Austral, Romero & Donaldson (2024) include many examples of design thinking in public health education, which suggests that design thinking would align with our health topic as well.  We currently have planned an activity in which students learn to evaluate the healthfulness of a meal and create healthy meals to apply the understanding of healthful eating to make personal choices.  We could alter this assignment to involve design thinking by asking students to help a fellow student make improvements to their diet. 

First, they would interview the other student in order to understand their current diet.  Next, they would define the problem by choosing something in the diet to improve.  They would then ideate by coming up with some ideas of changes to make in order to improve the diet, and prototype by creating a plan to make those changes.  They would propose the plan and seek feedback from the other student to test the prototype. Is this a plan that the other student could realistically follow? Does it seem consistent with food guidelines as they understand it?  The student would use this feedback to improve their suggested plan. 

This process would require the learner to understand both the target user and guidelines around healthy food choices, addressing the first Big Idea of the unit.

References