What do you do with a Problem? Designing on Thinking Thursday

By Anonymous -

Oh my goodness, our creativity was sparking today as we began our second design challenge.  This challenge was inspired by two books, here they are:

How creative can you get with a box?  A box is never just a box, what else could it be? Why are boxes such intriguing structures?

A link for a read aloud of this book:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNqLbzvWyYw

The main idea of the second book is that problems are opportunities for growing, learning, bravery and to make changes.  This book sparked so many connections, questions and inferences for us.  We really enjoyed how the illustrations showed the mood and struggles of the main character and it made us appreciate that your attitude and the approach you take to any situation directly impacts the outcome.  In other words, if you avoid problems and worry, then  they can become bigger, but if you decide to confront them and use flexible thinking to solve them, then they can be:  "joyful, and hopeful." 
  In the real world, designers are always finding problems to solve.  This book teaches us that we shouldn't try to ignore problems, instead we should look at them as opportunities to take action  and  make changes. 
 So we decided to look at how a cardboard box can be turned into a design that will help solve a problem.  We worked with partners on the first 3 stages of the design thinking cycle:  Empathy, Define Your Problem and Ideate.  

We like the idea of using cardboard because it is a renewable resource that is sustainable because it can be recycled.  It is also a very flexible material that can be bent into all different kinds of shapes and positions.  Here is a video of a young designer who makes furniture out of cardboard we watched this video after our ideate session:  http://www.chairigami.com/the-story.html

We  connected back to our previous learning conversations and decided to look at local and global problems to solve.  Some of the problems were:  How might  we   control the  echoes in our  Learning Commons?    How might we stop deforestation?  How might we stop plastic pollution?  How might we solve friendship problems?  

Check out the photos of our ideating today.  
Collaborating and communicating with each other. 
The process and our ideas visualized.  Using a mind map is a great way to organize your ideas.

Capturing our thinking in our thought journals.  






Stay tuned for the next stage, we will build  our prototypes and test them out.  
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