Learning to Design Backwards: Examining a means to introduce human-centered design processes to teachers and students

Abstract

‘Designing backwards’ is presented here as a means to
utilize human-centered processes in diverse educational
settings to help teachers and students learn to formulate
and operate design processes to achieve three sequential
and interrelated goals. The first entails teaching them to
effectively and empathetically identify, frame and analyze
complex social, technological, economic, environmental or
public policy problems, or problematic situations. The
second involves helping them cultivate understandings
from these problem - framing processes to iteratively
develop and then assess the relative efficacies of specific
prototypes or prototypical ideas that, if implemented,
could improve some aspects of these situations on behalf
of particular groups of stakeholders. In this context,
‘prototyping’ is defined as a heuristic process that allows
students to test how operating various strategies and
procedures, or deploying particular interventions in the
forms of communication systems, affordances, and tools
and toolkits, can yield insights about how to affect useful,
constructive transformations. The third goal challenges
students to correlate the knowledge they gleaned from
engaging in the first two processes to work with given
groups of stakeholders to develop and implement more
relevant, effective and appropriate outcomes to the
complex challenges that directly or indirectly affect specific
aspects of their lives.