Today the Design Thinking group was down a member: Andrew Rowan. He will return on Wednesday, though! Yay!
After mourning the loss of our award-winning blogger, we spent our morning eating donuts, among other activities. We began our “Spark” with a storytelling exercise, and we soon were placed in our design groups for the week. To get to know group members, we were sent on a walk with eggs. These eggs were VERY special eggs (some even were filled with candy:) !). More importantly, though, the eggs provided us with get to know you questions for the members of the newly formed design groups.
We then made our way back to the classroom and read articles about interview techniques in preparation for our “empathy interview” at the Pinelands Association. These articles emphasized the importance of asking good questions in order to gain a more insightful and meaningful response. With this new knowledge in mind, we made our way over to the Pinelands Association. There, we were reacquainted with Mr. Howell and met Mr. Montgomery. Over the course of 45 minutes, we asked many questions to help us more deeply understand the multiple dimensions of their issue. This interview represented the Empathy component of the DEEPdt process (Discovery, Empathy, Experiment, Prototype). We were pleased with the well thought-out answers that we received and headed to Wawa (YAY servant leadership!) for lunch. With full bellies, we headed back to the Pine Barrens for a walk through the woods.
We made our way through the woods and visited various sites that were relevant to the problem. We found it very interesting to see first-hand the very real effects of what had been alluded to in the interview. Contented, we returned to the bus and traveled back to school for some reflection on our day.