Design Thinking

DRAWING INSPIRATION FROM STANFORD

Empathize. Define. Ideate. Prototype. Test.

Design Thinking is a human-centered creative problem-solving process that provides the ‘how-to’ for those striving to think outside the box. It was made famous by David Kelley, the co-founder of the Stanford Design School and adopted at Oceanit in 2010 to spark strategic, creative, and innovative solutions. At Oceanit, Design Thinking is led by graduates from the Stanford d.school along with five facilitators trained by Stanford University.  

Design Thinking provides the principles and strategies to harness creative potential and to solve the most difficult and challenging problems—problems that are fuzzy or undefined, where no obvious solutions seem to work. To do so, Design Thinking employs five core phases:

1. Empathy puts human and user needs at the center of design process
2. Define is about identifying the correct problem to solve based upon user feedback
3. Ideation is a process of “going wide” in terms of possible concepts and outcomes
4. Prototyping is the iterative generation of artifacts intended to answer questions to move you towards a solution
5. Testing is the geared at soliciting feedback from the prototypes you have created from your users.

Oceanit hosts multiple “whole school” annual Design Thinking Boot Camps along with monthly training workshops for executives, government organizations, non-profits, and businesses. We began to bring Design Thinking to schools, students, and educators in 2010 and are excited to build upon that momentum under SURF. 

Since 2011, Oceanit has trained 4000 educators and staff from over 200 schools in Design Thinking. We have also conducted workshops with more than 2000 students directly. Our goal for Design Thinking as a core SURF program is to train more than 5,000 educators in the DT creative problem-solving methodology.