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.