Design Thinking With Kids: Playfulness And Structure Open Up Minds And Hearts

In March 2020, when things were looking gloomy in China, many friends in our environment decided to really look after each other, meet regularly and nurture our minds and bodies together in order to get through this crisis.

Sometimes this meant a mother needed some space. For tasks that required concentration. My friend Wang Man and I occasionally hosted play dates to free up each other’s day a bit. I brought up the idea of a Design Thinking workshop to break up the usual homeschooling routine and create an enjoyable leaning environment for kids of varying ages.

Creative problem solving is a life skill!

I am a big fan of gamification and preach to my clients that a well-designed game says more than 1000 words. Design Thinking is a creative problem solving technique and an agile practice. It is fun for adults and should be even more natural for kids since it involves drawing, making collages and telling stories. Being silly is also encouraged.

My daughter Antonia does not like writing. Well, that is not true. She likes imaginative stories but hates checking and changing at the end and getting criticized for her spelling mistakes. With my criticism about the mistakes she makes, which I considered below par, I had managed to completely demotivate her to the point where she was boycotting even holding a pen. Time for a fresh start with other kids around and using a fresh technique. No pressure to write a perfect story according to school standards but with the key metric “imagination”.

Design Thinking follows simple principles:

The Design Thinking process: There are six steps that need to be covered.

Empathize

This is the starting point for any agile practice and requires you to put yourself into the shoes of the customer. You take a real person and find out what she wants to achieve, what motivates her way of life. From my consulting experience with adults, I know that it is good to stay in this phase for a long time and do this thoroughly. Once you have fully connected with the customer, all the other steps are easy.

Define the problem

based on the intelligence gathered you choose a topic at headline level that you want to work on.

Ideate

Brainstorm until you find solutions and product ideas for the problem defined earlier.

Prototype

Very quickly, you sketch the beta-version of a product. The purpose is to check if it really works once transferred from the idea-level into the real world. The second reason for creating a prototype is that it allows you to show it to others, ideally your target audience and get feedback.

This is done in the following phase:

Test to learn

According to my experience, this is the hardest step. After all this creativity and crafting, which is uplifting and energy-consuming at the same time, it can be very sobering to show the result to outsiders. Creating a questionnaire to get awareness of the weaknesses of the current result. It is tough and at the same time reflects the Google mantra “Get out of the f*cking office!”

Tell your story

or a pitch wraps up the whole process.

How does this actually work?

Connect facts and feelings, logic and intuition

We use techniques that trigger the brain to work in a rounded way. Usually, adults sit on a computer screen with just one finger at the mouse. This is all the sensual impulse they get. The situation of school kids is often not much better. With Design Thinking, we count in our surroundings, browse through magazines, cut, glue, draw, craft. Suddenly, we connect with parts of our decision making capabilities that are underutilized most of the time.

Make magic happen

This is the ultimate purpose: To create this WOW! This “What if?!” moment is just priceless. In order to get there, you must be totally free. No fear of being silly, no pressure to deliver feasible results immediately, which, chokes the free flow of ideas.

Playfulness, which is a key component of Design Thinking comes naturally to all healthy children and therefore I was curious to find out what happens when they work with this agile practice.

My first experiment was with three primary school kids, one of them being my daughter Antonia. Their task was to write a story filled with fantasy. First, they should define main characters and then describe them with as much detail as possible. What do they like to do? Who are their friends? How are they dressed? For inspiration, they could browse our house, magazines or their own mind.

It is a good idea to try out agile practices with your kids before doing them with your client 😉

Brigitte

Then they created the initial story lines by drawing on post-it stickers or cut out pictures from magazines. It was important that everything stayed flexible and the single elements could easily be moved or replaced.

When they had made up their mind about the problem and the solution of their stories they came up with titles. Next it was time to re-work the stories, maybe change the thread and add details. It was now time to present the stories to experts – which were the other kids. By re-telling they learned which parts were particularly funny, which lacked consistency (not that it actually mattered) and where their audience lost interest.

Stories miraculously started flowing

Equipped with this intelligence, they started writing their stories. This was the most amazing part because all stories miraculously flowed on the paper. All the content was already inside their inner selves ready to be released. My daughter had lost her anxiety and sentences just burst out of her.

This is the effect I also observe when doing Design Thinking workshops with grown-ups:

• First, for a long time not much seems to happen. All the action is happening in the inner realm but then everything materializes very quickly.
• The whole process is intense and when finished, everybody feels very tired.
• The results are filled with emotions.

To wrap it up, the kids presented their stories. Most of them were very weird, I have to admit. However, this is what you get when you ask them to go wild and overload the stories with fantasy, I believe.

However, they also needed guidance not to get lost in just playing but combining playfulness with target-orientation. The kids all had her individual struggles at some point, be it losing concentration, meeting anxieties or falling into unproductive patterns. I could have employed even more tools from my usual Design Thinking workshops from the corporate environment, like the Cover Story or templates for story boards but I was cautious not to spread the activity out too much and risk losing the children. I was not sure about the collective attention span but assumed three hours of intensive work might be the maximum.

The event was over a full morning. Amazingly, all children embraced the exercise with motivation and awe. They enjoyed the creative chaos when sitting in the middle of all the materials that were provided and the process overall. That evening, I received messages from the parents telling me that the kids wanted to do something like this again.