Julia von Thienen

Towards a Paradigm Shift in Education Practice: Developing Twenty-First Century Skills with Design Thinking

Science, business and social organizations alike describe a strong need for a set of skills and competencies, often referred to as twenty-first century skills and competencies (e.g. Pink, Wagner, Gardner). For many young people, schools are the only place where such competencies and skills can be learned. Therefore, educational systems are coming more and more under pressure to provide students with the social values and attitudes as well as with the constructive experiences they need, to benefit from the opportunities and contribute actively to the new spaces of social life and work. Contrary to this demand, the American as well as the German school system has a strong focus on cognitive skills, acknowledging the new need, but not supporting it in practice. Why is this so? True, we are talking about a complex challenge, but when one makes the effort to take a closer look, it quickly becomes apparent that most states have not even bothered to properly identify and conceptualize the set of skills and competencies they require. Neither have they incorporated them into their educational standards.

The Co-evolution of Theory and Practice in Design Thinking – or – “Mind the Oddness Trap!”

In Design Thinking, theory and practice are closely interconnected. The theory serves as a blueprint, guiding companies in general and design teams in particular through the design process. Given such a close interrelation of theory and practice, we argue that Design Thinking research needs to be set up in a particular way too. This setup ties in with Design Thinking process models: To attain ever more befitting design solutions, prototypes are supposed to be tested and refined. Correspondingly, Design Thinking research should help to test and refine theory elements of Design Thinking. Researchers may serve as “dialogue facilitators,” aiding the community of Design Thinkers to intensify their “dialogue” with empirical reality.

If You Want to Know Who You Are, Tell Me Where You Are: The Importance of Places

As we manoeuvre through life we often try to predict other people’s behaviors and feelings; sometimes even our own. A classical take on the matter is to refer to character traits. But there is another source of information we may tap for our predictions – highly relevant and still often overlooked: knowledge of where the person is. At what place? In which context?

How Design Thinking Tools Help To Solve Wicked Problems

If design thinking is a means to solve problems – what problems is it good for? Obviously, it is not made to help physicists compute precise mathematical solutions. Neither does it help the industry to make their standard products a little faster, smaller or shinier than before.

What Can Design Thinking Learn from Behavior Group Therapy

Some widely-used approaches in Behavior Group Therapy bear a striking resemblance to Design Thinking. They invoke almost identical process-models and share central maxims like “defer judgement” or “go for quantity”. Heuristics for composing groups (mixed!) and preferred group sizes (4–6) are very much alike as well. Also, the roles ascribed to therapists are quite similar to that of Design Thinking coaches. Given these obvious analogies, it is most natural to ask what the two traditions can learn from one another – and why it is that they are so strikingly alike. This article ultimately hopes to inspire further investigations by giving examples of how Design Thinking may profit from taking a look at Behavior Group Therapy. We will discuss (a) new techniques for coaches to detect and treat personal dissonances that impede project work, (b) new methods for teams to upgrade empathy, find crucial needs or test prototypes and (c) theoretical insights regarding what happens in the process.

Redesigning Medical Encounters with Tele-Board MED

The roles and perspectives of the patient and the health care provider could hardly be more different, yet both pursue the common goal of restoring or preserving the patient’s health. The path to a satisfying health care outcome is manifold, and the quality of the patient-provider relationship is an impactful factor. We discuss different models for the classification of patient-provider interaction as well as for patient empowerment. On this theoretical basis we elaborate on how patient-provider interaction can be enhanced in practice by means of the medical documentation system Tele-Board MED. This system is a collaborative eHealth application designed to support the interaction between patient and provider in clinical encounters. Simultaneously, it aims at making case documentation more efficient for providers and more valuable for patients. As a research paradigm, the Tele-Board MED project has used a design thinking approach to understand and support fundamental stakeholder needs. Psychotherapy has been chosen as a first field of application for Tele-Board MED research and interventions. This chapter shares insights and findings from empathizing with users, defining a point of view, ideating and testing prototypes. We found that a joint, transparent case documentation was very well received by patients. This documentation increased the acceptance of diagnoses and encouraged a team feeling between patient and therapist.

Tele-Board MED: Supporting Twenty-First Century Medicine for Mutual Benefit

Tele-Board MED is a medical documentation system designed to support patient-doctor cooperation at eye level. In particular, it tackles the challenge of turning medical documentation from a necessity, which disturbs the treatment flow, into a curative process by itself. With its focus on cooperative documentation, Tele-Board MED embraces a call uttered by many scientists and politicians nowadays for twenty-first century medicine and patient empowerment. At the same time, the project is deeply rooted in the culture of design thinking. Accordingly, the benefit for patients should not be at the expense of doctors. Rather, the needs of all stakeholders shall be discerned and served. Behaviour psychotherapy has been chosen as a first field of application for Tele-Board MED. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, an initial feedback study was launched with 34 behaviour psychotherapists. It showed that many therapists are skeptical towards digital documentation and record transparency in general. Nonetheless, Tele-Board MED is considered helpful and promising. In particular, therapists estimate to save one third of their normal working time when assembling case reports with the system. The vast majority of therapists can well imagine using Tele-Board MED with patients. Apart from that, quantitative methodological strategies—though seldom used in the design thinking community—proved to be potent tools for carving out needs and insights that will inspire the next generation of Tele-Board MED.

Tele-Board MED: Supporting Creative Problem Solving in Behaviour Psychotherapy

The ability to solve life problems creatively is an important attribute of mentally healthy people. It helps to handle all kinds of life challenges. Correspondingly, behaviour psychotherapists teach patients an approved process of creative problem solving to advance their mental health. Interestingly, the process model psychotherapists implement to tackle life problems is not at all unique. Engineers use and teach almost an identical process to confront engineering design problems, referring to their approach as “design thinking”. Parallels like these open up multiple opportunities for a fruitful exchange. In this chapter, we present a design thinking based problem solving crash course for psychotherapy to help people tackle personal life problems creatively. The crash course has been set up on Tele-Board MED, a digital documentation system for medical settings.

Learning from Success and Failure in Healthcare Innovation: The Story of Tele-Board MED

Tele-Board MED is a digital documentation system for medical encounters. It is used as an adjunct to talk-based mental health interventions. Having reported study results on Tele-Board MED a number of times—which always reflected the favorable aspects of the system—audiences have also been interested in any failures along the way. Indeed, there are two good reasons why such occasional failures are more than an entertaining footnote to a project. First, design thinking holds that they are critical for learning. Second, innovations in the healthcare sector are known to be particularly challenging. In this chapter, we thus reanalyze the Tele-Board MED project, focusing on both successes and failures along the way and tracing their role for the development of the project.