“Maybe stories are just data for the soul?”
~ Dr. Brene Brown
Hello HEALers,
We are back in the saddle this week! Over the break, I had the opportunity to read and respond to many of your design thinking posts. I am impressed with how you applied this new paradigm to your articles, websites, and papers. Each of you took a slightly different approach in how you interpreted the model and I appreciated that diversity.
Creating the assignment was just as challenging! It was difficult for me to adapt this design thinking model as a framework for reviewing literature. At the beginning of Stephen’s course, I talked about developing an annotated bibliography for your readings to track the main ideas of the content covered. Annotated bibliographies also help to reinforce the material because you’re synthesizing and summarizing the article. The problem I have with this model is that the reader is quite passive in the learning process and you’re less likely to remember and connect with the content because of this lack of engagement. As I covered in the class, the model asks you define the following:
Research Problem - Research Question - Methodology - Variables - Summary
The design thinking paradigm asks you to “interact” with the subject matter. The model encourages you to critically examine what is presented as well as asks you to contribute to the solution. In fact, authors frequently fail to provide readers with recommendations or ideas as to how to remedy the problem that they discuss in great detail!
Empathy - Define the Problem - Ideate - Prototype - Test
While taking notes on your posts, the two phases that I thought needed further attention were “empathy” and “ideate.” This RSA animated video of Dr. Brene Brown’s lecture on empathy is fantastic:
In summary, what she states is that empathy means “feeling with people.” As she explains, “Empathy fuels connection and sympathy drives disconnection.” Brown cites Nursing scholar Theresa Wiseman’s work describing the four qualities of empathy:
1. Perspective taking: the ability to see the world as others.
2. Staying out of judgment: judgment may emerge when our abilities, beliefs, and values important to us are challenged.
3. Recognizing emotion in other people: involves understanding and developing awareness of other's emotional state.
4. Communicating your understanding of a person’s emotional state: this skill is exercised when we reflect, interpret, clarify, and articulate our feelings, as well as others, in order to create a meaningful connection.
As Brown continues, empathy is a “choice” and expressing empathy acknowledges our own vulnerabilities. In order to truly empathize, you have to search within yourself and identify that experience that connects you to the emotional state of the other person.
Ideate. When it came to generating new ideas and approaches, I thought that many of the posts played it relatively safe and stayed within the box. I understand this line of thinking. When I went through the same exercise, I said to myself, “What is really reasonable here? Why invest my time in a wild, far-fetched idea when I know it will probably be met with rejection, ridicule, and judgment?”
But, blue-sky thinking can play a critical role in bettering our situation and changing the course of our reality. For example, think about all the creative, unfathomable ideas generated by the writers of Star Trek that have now become a part of our daily lives: telepresence, photoplethysmography technology, hypospray, phasers, and universal translators to name a few! Even Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak!
I hope the design thinking post inspires you to exercise the course content and rethink, challenge, and engage with the paradigms that are presented.
Cheers!
Jacqueline
References
Brown, B. (2007). I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn’t): Telling the Truth About Perfectionism, Inadequacy, and Power. New York, NY: Gotham Books.
Wiseman, T. (2008). A Concept Analysis of Empathy. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 23(6). Retrieved from: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.1365-2648.1996.12213.x/abstract
Empathy + Equity → Justice
http://interactioninstitute.org/blog/2013/12/16/empathy-equity-→-justice/
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