Design thinking: a world trend in education

On June 27-28 in Almaty Management University was held the seminar on design thinking. About the new trend in the field of education, participants of a seminar are teachers, representatives of the companies – have learned from the international expert in the field of design of thinking - Katy Kavanaugh (Stanford University, the USA).

The new technique, which can be used in many fields including education, is urged to work more effectively during global reforms. The speaker, Katy Kavanaugh, is a master in the field of educational technologies, in 2010 has graduated from "Stanford University", and also Stenford Institute of Design Hasso Plattner Institute of Design.

Katy is also the project manager for the design-thinking in Silicon Valley Innovation Center and one of the invited coaches to promote new reforms in the education system of Kazakhstan. Previously guests had workshops cycle of design thinking in the Nazarbayev Intellectual School in Astana. At present, she is actively implementing an interdisciplinary methodology for the development of student’s creativity, and promotes the design-thinking technology in education, business and film industry.

According to Katy Kavanaugh, design thinking - a multidisciplinary approach to the problems with the use of prototypes in the early process of modeling. "Our process begins with the receipt of empathy and understanding of those for whom we develop the idea," - said the speaker. Under the prototypes are understood different crafts from scrap materials, which help to visualize the proposals of the participants. So, one of the prototypes of the seminar was "woman-robot", modeled by the audience out of the chair, a few items of clothing and ball.

"Instead of just sitting and speaking about ideas, we build these ideas. By producing a prototype, we understand idea physically, it gives something that we can show to consumers. Thus, they can see how the product will look like, and give us responses so that we could make it better. In fact, we learn from our customers. The contrast to design thinking is a bunch of smart guys sitting in the room, coming up with something to design and then put it on the market and hoping someone to like it. Design thinking begins, first of all, from understanding the needs of the consumer,"  – says K. Kavanaugh.

Participants of a seminar tell about creation of so-called "visual history" (the narration through design) for transfer of an essence of the created decision using innovative techniques:

Galia Baitileuova, chief specialist of the Center of development of business Kazakh: "A problem that we have decided to take for development, - healthy food. Unfortunately, we can not always eat properly, and it reflects on ours health. Our idea consisted in bringing products from rural areas to our own restaurant in AlmaU. Actually we have created idea, made the analysis, and logistics, presented our design thinking, but the main thing – we have tried to cause empathy, empathy of other people. I hope we have succeeded."