DP0

What

The assignment

DP0 stands for "design project zero." It is a basic approach for working through an entire cycle of the design process. Pair up with another person in this class at a time when both of you can commit around 40 minutes of uninterrupted time. You and your partner will take turns interviewing, designing for, and testing your solutions for each other. The worksheets below provide more detailed instructions. If you prefer you can simply interview a friend or roommate and conduct "just one side" of the design project; your "subject" won't have to interview or design for you because this isn't a graded assignment for them. 

Some notes for New Venture Development students in Winterim: 

• you will actually conduct the original "redesign the 'gift-giving' experience" Design Project Zero activity since it's the holidays!

• your partner doesn't have to perform his/her side of the design project zero interviews unless they are also taking the same class with you. Ideally you are interviewing a grandparent or other sufficiently experienced individual for this activity.

The technique

Design thinking has its origins in Simon’s interpretation of design as “the transformation of existing conditions into preferred ones” (Simon, 1996: 4). More recently, design thinking has been described as a mindset that focuses on the mental processes designers use to design objects, services or systems, rather than on the end result of elegant and useful products (Dunne & Martin, 2006). Design thinking is a methodology that allows organizations to innovate productively into the future based on what they will learn from new insights into user or customer needs. 

How do designers gain insights into what people want? One important attribute for gaining these insights is empathy for others’ needs. Design empathy is an approach that draws upon people’s real-world experiences to develop a deep emotional understanding of people’s needs and to “unlock the creative capacity for innovation” (Battarbee, Suri, & Howard, 2014). Therefore design thinking and its emphasis on empathy are critical areas of skill development for teaching innovation to undergraduate business students. Because design thinking is a relatively new discipline, academic institutions like Stanford University’s “d.school” (technically known as the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design) have developed experiential educational materials to disseminate approaches to design thinking.

“Design Project Zero” (DP0) is a framework developed and used by the d.school to expose students to an entire design cycle in 90 minutes or less. The design projects emphasize experiences that are shared by nearly everyone, but in slightly different ways. This approach allows students to conduct interviews that are rich in content even when interacting with a complete stranger (Stanford d.school, 2015a). I adapted the DP0 framework to focus on a potentially engaging and challenging topic in which all of my students would have some exposure: the “college experience” (Armstrong, 2016).

Read, View, Do

Read

• Introducing Design Project Zero (google slides)

• Hasso Plattner Stanford School of Design, n.d. An Introduction to Design Thinking Process Guide, Google doc

• An Introduction to Design Thinking: PROCESS MODE d.school, Stanford.edu

Do

For Winter Interim courses:

• READ THIS FACILITATOR'S GUIDE to understand what they are trying to accomplish with the different questions: Hasso Plattner Stanford School of Design, n.d. An Introduction to Design Thinking, “Gift-Giving” Edition: Facilitator’s Guide, Google doc.

• Use this template to complete the assignment

• Submit your completed document through this google form. (Note: If you printed this out in order to complete the assignment, see if you can line up all the pages next to each other and take a readable picture of it to submit. If you edited the actual template (using your own copy, of course), then submit that entire file through this form. Ask me if you need help)

These items below are placeholders for different activities that WINTER INTERIM STUDENTS DO NOT NEED TO DO

For F2022 course:

• Introducing Design Project Zero (google slides)

• Design Project Zero worksheet (google doc)

For F2020 course: pick a worksheet (electronic or print to hard copy)

• Design Project Zero: On-Campus Education During COVID (Google Doc)

• Design Project Zero: On-Campus Education During COVID (PDF)

NOTE: Each person turns in his or her OWN project; you *do* pair, but this is an *individual* assignment. One document to me from each student.

Debrief for Dealing with Covid DP0

Feedback - Optional but welcomed