Like every good class, this course has a method or a theory behind it that makes it work. The Career Design Lab actually has several. But for a moment, I'd like to pull back the curtain and tell you about one of the methods we're using, which is called design thinking. This isn't a course on design thinking, but it is a course about career design. Knowing just a little about design thinking will help you understand why we're doing things the way we're doing them. Consider for a moment that there are different thinking that are useful in different situations. For example, if an engineer is trying to create a new engine or a computer operating system they have to think in particular ways to accomplish that. Engineering thinking often involves the ability to think in systems by breaking things into nodes or finding structure. There's also a big focus on constraints and trade-offs. Ultimately, an engineer is thinking about how to solve a specific problem, and usually there's one best solution they eventually arrive at. At universities, we do a lot of research, which is, again, a particular way of thinking. Research revolves around controlled experiments, which isolate and test variables based on a hypothesis. Then we carefully analyze results to produce new knowledge. You could say that researchers analyze their way forward. Design thinking is yet another way of thinking that focuses on solving problems by understanding a user's needs and generating creative new solutions. Design thinking is non-linear and iterative, which means you define problems and prototype to quickly try out multiple versions of the design. We could say that design thinking is all about building your way forward rather than analyzing a problem or solving an equation. It's about quickly coming up with ideas and trying them out knowing that once you build something, and put it out there in the world you'll get lots more information that will influence the design. Sometimes design thinking is called human-centered design because it's all about people, and how they interact with products and services. Design thinking is used widely at most big tech companies including Apple, Google, and IBM, and the popular hosting platform, Airbnb, was developed through a design thinking process. But design thinking is also used to re-imagine government processes and social services. For example, the City of South Bend, Indiana use design thinking to create a lifelong learning platform that connects community members, and helps them stay resilient through change. What unifies these very different examples is a process or method, which we can think about as a series of five steps. The steps in design thinking are: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. I'll explain the steps with a simple example. Let's imagine you're trying to design a new shopping cart, which is a real thing design thinking has been used to do. Empathize means you try to understand the perspectives, needs, and feelings of the people you're designing for, in this case, shopping cart users. What would be the easiest way to do that? Probably your first step would be to go to a grocery store and use a shopping cart or interview people in the store to find out what's working and what their challenges are. You empathize with the users. Next, you define a problem that guide the rest of the design process. For example, how might we make it easier for supermarket shoppers to get the items they need quickly? The third step is to ideate or come up with lots of solutions, even wild, unrealistic solutions. Designers know that the number 1 enemy of creativity is judgment so the key to effective ideation is to set aside judgment or evaluation until later in the process. Next, designers take the best ideas and try them out through smalls, cheap trial versions. In the case of a shopping cart, the design team would quickly build several different versions of the new product they're imagining and take this back to the supermarket to try it out. The final step is to select a solution and test it out maybe by implementing the new shopping cart at a single grocery store. It's important to know that these steps are iterative and non-linear, which means that at any point in the process you might circle back to a previous step, or jump forward to a later step. There's no formula for design thinking but these five steps, often roughly in this order, get pretty close to providing a method for creative, user-centered design. What does all this have to do with your career? Well, design thinking happens to also be a great method for figuring out what you want to do with your life. A while back two Stanford professors named Bill Burnett and Dave Evans figured this out when they decided to apply the principles of design thinking to help college students figure out what to do with their life. They eventually created a popular course at Stanford called Designing Your Life, which later turned into a book and eventually a training for educators at other universities who wanted to offer similar courses. This course builds on life design principles as well as positive psychology, and career coaching to help anyone design a meaningful and engaging career. Let's look at how the design thinking steps we just discussed map onto what you're doing in the Career Design Lab. The first step in design thinking is to empathize with the user. When you design your career, who is the user? It's you. That's why in Week 2 of this course you spent a lot of time empathizing with yourself. We wanted to figure out what you find meaningful and engaging, which is why we looked at your strengths, virtues, beliefs, and skills. Step 2 is to define the problem, which in this case is some version of this question, what career paths might I take that would lead to a coherent work life? The next step is to ideate by thinking of lots of next career directions. That's our goal this week. We're going to use brainstorming to help you think of new ideas and then you'll choose three very different paths to explore in more detail. After this ideation process it's time to prototype or test out a few ideas. But we want to do this in quick, easy ways. We want something faster and simpler than getting a job or an internship. What you'll do is have conversations with people doing work similar to what you're considering. You'll use these conversations to answer questions, challenge your assumptions, and help clarify what career you want to pursue. Then finally, in the last week of this course we'll get into Step 5, which is to choose a career to test out next. You'll do this by getting a job or pursuing whatever is the next logical opportunity. It might feel like this last step means you're deciding what you're going to do with your life but don't even go there. Most people don't stay in any given job for more than a year or two of these days so think of your next job as a test that may be a perfect fit or may not be. If it's not, you'll learn things and those will help you return to the design process, and try something different. This is how the five steps of design thinking map onto the career design approach you're learning in this course. An even simpler way to think about design thinking is that it combines convergent and divergent thinking. Most of us get lots of practice at convergent thinking, which just means taking lots of information and using it to narrow down to the best solution. The traditional job search looks a lot like the second half of this diagram. You look at your options, figure out the best one, and choose. We're all taught convergent thinking in school when we learn to do math problems or research a topic and write a report, but we're rarely taught how to do divergent thinking, which is the ability to generate many ideas or solutions from a single piece of information. Design thinking adds this whole earlier phase in which we empathize and define a problem and use brainstorming to create lots of new options. Divergent thinking is a key process in creativity and it can be taught and practiced just like convergent thinking. Successfully designing your career requires both stages, intentionally creating more options and then intentionally narrowing down those options. First, diverge then converge. Why learn the theory behind the method? First of all, I hope that by appreciating the method behind what you're learning you'll stick with it and realize there's a reason for how we're doing it. You might think, I already know what I want to do next so I'm just going to jump ahead to Week 4. But you'll miss a lot if you skip the ideation phase. I've seen it happen many times where someone thinks they know what they want to do next, but after they take some time to understand themselves better and consider a broader set of options they change their career path and do something totally different. If you want a really great career design be mindful of the process. Design thinking also helps us remember that we can't think our way to a great career design. We have to get out there and try stuff. We have to build our way forward. Designers say building is thinking, which means you could spend months self-reflecting and taking career assessments and researching jobs on the Internet, but you might not actually get anywhere. You should do the reflective work but then you have to get out there and prototype your career design, interview people, and hear about their experiences, and shadow them, and eventually get a job. Only by going out there in the real world and trying things will you really know if the career that you're designing is a great fit. Stick with the process and stay open in this ideation phase. A few fresh ideas could change everything, and that might just be what you came here for.
