On May 13, the University of St. Thomas’s
Schulze School of Entrepreneurship hosted at least 50 MSP and Greater Minnesota nonprofit leaders and social entrepreneurs at DesignHack!, a one-of-a-kind event billed as a crash course in “human centered design.” The goal: to leverage the same principles behind simple but radical consumer product improvements, like OXO’s now-ubiquitous kitchen measuring cup with angled 3D fill lines.
DesignHack! Used
Stanford University’s five-step design thinking model — which asks designers to approach problems “looking out from the inside, not outside in” — to tackle a core challenge: How do we rethink philanthropy to increase public engagement?
Dr. AnnMarie Thomas and Laura Dunham, who teach at the Schulze School, led attendees through design thinking’s five steps:
- Empathy: Discovering users’ implicit and explicit needs — the learning phase
- Define: Refocusing questions to drill deeper into users’ needs and determine how they can be met through design
- Ideate: Brainstorming creative design solutions
- Prototype: Making those solutions tangible
- Test: Determining whether those solutions work in practice
The typical design project takes weeks or even months, noted Dunham. DesignHack! attendees had just a single workday, so they weren’t able to run through a proper start-to-finish simulation.
But they did get to wander Minneapolis’s skyway system on a busy Friday, pulling aside passersby and asking open-ended questions about their relationship with modern philanthropy. Participants worked in pairs: one lead questioner and one note-taker/observer, with roles flipping periodically.
Per Dunham, they followed some basic design thinking “do’s” and “don’ts”:
- Do listen more than you speak
- Do ask how, then follow up with why
- Do probe for specific experiences and stories, not abstractions or generalizations
- Don’t ask leading questions (“push polling”)
- Don’t monopolize the conversation
- Don’t try to fill silences
- Don’t push the respondent to wrap up or conclude
- Don’t reaffirm your own bias
- Don’t ask what respondents want
In other words, don’t look for empirical conclusions right away. Instead, allow respondents to create their own narratives. “Be more Oprah than Edison,” quipped Dunham.
“Channel your inner two-year-old,” added Thomas. “Ask ‘how this’ and ‘why that.’”
It’s safe to bet that DesignHack! attendees didn’t solve philanthropy’s engagement problem in the course of a single afternoon. But they definitely left Minneapolis equipped with new tools for tackling the complex issues that vex their organizations every day.