Teaching Design Thinking

 My job as a teaching assistant for Dartmouth’s Introduction to Design Thinking class has been exceptionally fulfilling. Working to elevate equity as a consideration for new designers has been a highlight.

I’ve enjoyed working with new designers – facilitating feedback sessions, helping them get un-stuck while brainstorming, and trying to make my excitement about design thinking contagious. By involving myself in teaching design thinking, I’ve been able to solidify my own skills.

A clear highlight of my experience as a TA has been working to bring equity considerations into the curriculum. Through changes in assignment prompts and the way we coach student teams, we’ve tried to encourage students to consider their own positionality and biases as they design, as well as the user groups that their designs might marginalize.

The most substantial curriculum change, however, has been our revamp of the class’ “reading list.” Over the course of six months, I worked with a small group of TAs to make substantial changes to the list of ~55 articles, lectures, and other materials that students are required to consume throughout the quarter. We started by investigating who is represented in our reading list: we found that over 90% of the authors were white, and almost 70% were male. We’re concerned that this propagates the canonization of white and male perspectives in design, at the expense of the extremely valuable perspectives of other designers. It also makes some students who are not white men feel as if they do not belong. Additionally, the pre-overhaul reading list almost entirely ignored issues of equity – an omission that had bothered me ever since my first term on the job.

For several months hungrily consumed content from designers who are not white or male, particularly those who center equity in their work, meeting weekly to discuss which of our findings would be the most useful additions to the course. We also re-read the pre-revamp materials so we could make informed recommendations about which ones the professors should replace. In the end, we convinced the professors to replace almost 1/3 of the course readings with equity-focused material, largely by women, people of color, and folks with other marginalized identities.   

During this fall quarter, we prototyped our first round of changes to the reading list. We also decided that these new equity-focused readings needed engagement beyond the written page, so we piloted a series of small-group reading discussions, which I loved facilitating. The discussions provided students with an opportunity not only to process the readings, but also to think about how they can use their values to inform their designs. 

While facilitating these discussions and reading about people using design for social good, I’ve been doing my own reflections as well, asking: Who do I want to be, as a designer?