I carried out an experiment recently to see if I could carry out a design thinking process in a live online session. The problem I wanted to work on was a humanitarian one but presented under an intercultural lens.
I was invited to dialogue with Franklin Yartey’s students at Dubuque University in Iowa, who contacted me through our Absolutely Intercultural podcast. At the time of the invite I had just read two very powerful articles about completely different subjects which gave me the starting point for the session which would be online, with me in Denmark and Yartey’s class in Iowa. I emailed:
In the last week I have been struck by two articles:
The first was about the dismissive attitude towards women in India expressed through known rapists http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31698154 but apparently shared by many men in India.
And the second was written by the guru of empathy Roman Krznaric about the value of developing empathy for those generally regarded as evil, in his case the oligarchs of Guatamala. http://m.dailygood.org/story/951/empathy-with-the-enemy-roman-krznaric/
Reading the BBC article I was wondering where you would ever begin with these men and reading the Krznaric article I felt that this was one way in, but I wondered if it was enough and whether there were any shortcuts or at least other effective approaches.
There is a great deal to unpack here since my starting point is based on a whole range of assumptions that I assume other right-thinking people would share with me. I could start by checking whether that is the case.
I know no more than your students about India or Guatamala so this would not be to share my knowledge about these situations. However I would be interested to explore possible solutions, with the possibility that there are no solutions also included.
The BBC article was about the film India’s Daughter that caused a worldwide furore about the ethics of interviewing rapists and ended up being removed from YouTube by the BBC. One of the key points we learned from the film is that the band who raped the woman, who eventually died of her injuries, were at the bottom of India’s social heap. This raised questions of social justice and what could be done to change the mindset which led to the atrocity in the first place.
So I was going to use the design thinking process to see if there was a way of understanding more about what is going on in India. I knew that the class had been taking a close look at the issue of white privilege in the USA, so I thought that looking at an issue external to the US might be useful and that they might be able to extend what they had learned about white privilege to see how far it reflected male privilege, which seemed to be (part of) the issue in India.
Since this would only be a one hour session there was no way we could carry out the experimentation and evaluation phases of the process shown below. However, I thought that we could at least try to define the problem and start to come up with some solutions and maybe choose a solution.
Practical preparation
1. Preparatory reading
The two articles mentioned above were assigned as preparatory reading.
2. Synchronous meeting tool
We used zoom.us in which to meet. It is a free online meeting tool with automatic recording and the ability to share screens or use a whiteboard.
3. TodaysMeet
Since conferencing tools can be demanding of bandwidth. I prepared a room on Todays Meet that would act as a simple chat back channel. This meant that our synchronous meeting was only two-way between me and the teacher in Iowa who was projecting the audio and the visuals. It also meant that when I was speaking directly with the students they had to come forward to the front of the room to use the mike.
4. Scratchpad
The design thinking process requires everyone to contribute and also the ability to rearrange people’s ideas in order to identify emerging themes. So I set up a Padlet wall on which anyone can write without having to set up an account beforehand. The great thing about Padlet is that once people have made their contributions you can move the comments around as if they were on Post-It sticky notes. This meant that the results could be moderated by me as the facilitator.
Session record
When we met for the session, I realised that not everyone had a device. So this meant that this was not as communal an exercise as I had hoped. The students certainly confirmed to me the power of the two articles. I could sense that some of them had had an almost physical reaction to the content.
Still we were able to use the Padlet wall as intended and I was able to move the sticky notes round as they were appearing during the session so that we could gather similar sentiments together.
Feedback
The feedback was generally positive noting
- That it is interesting to be able to invite guest speakers in this way
- There were mixed opinions on the use of design thinking. Some observed that there was not enough time to explore the issues properly while some were hoping for some expert opinion from me (even though I have none and the design thinking process is not about expert opinion).
- Some found the material too strongly emotional
Takeaways
- An exercise like this will work much better if everyone is online and able to contribute for themselves. This was why I set up the Padlet wall and the Today’s Meet chat channel.
- I hesitate to show examples of good practice because I am very much aware that the process matters much more than the product. So you might find it difficult to make sense of the Padlet wall but the feedback shows that the session succeeded in awakening the students’ interest and in priming them to consider various possible solutions.
Image credit: Christine Prefontaine