Design Thinking for kids in rural context of India
Creating rural entrepreneurship opportunities in India
This is a guide to understanding the importance of design thinking for kids in the rural context of India. How can teachers convey the importance of design thinking methods to the kids and how can the kids learn design thinking tools and techniques? finally, how can teachers use design thinking methods themselves as a part of their teaching methodology?
“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” ~ Albert Einstein
🤔 What is design thinking?
Design thinking is a method of solving problems that puts people first. It involves understanding the needs of the people you are trying to help, coming up with creative solutions, and testing those solutions to see what works best. Design thinking is a non-linear process, meaning that it is not always a straight line from problem to solution. Instead, it is an iterative process of understanding, brainstorming, and testing. This makes it a good approach for solving problems that are complex or unknown.
Here are the five phases of design thinking:
Empathize: This phase involves understanding the needs of the people you are trying to help. You can do this by talking to them, observing them, and putting yourself in their shoes.
Define: This phase involves defining the problem in a way that is human-centered. This means understanding the problem from the perspective of the people who are affected by it.
Ideate: This phase involves coming up with creative solutions to the problem. You can do this by brainstorming, sketching, and prototyping.
Prototype: This phase involves creating a working model of your solution. This can be a physical model, a digital model, or even a role-playing exercise.
Test: This phase involves testing your solution with the people you are trying to help. This will help you to see what works well and what needs to be improved.
Design thinking is a powerful tool that can be used to solve problems in a variety of contexts. It is a process that is both creative and collaborative, and it can help you to come up with truly innovative solutions.
🧑🏻🎓 Kids in the rural context of India
Understanding the children in rural contexts of India is crucial due to the significance of their environment. Many rural areas in India are still remote and difficult to access. Due to significant efforts by the government and rural administrative departments such as gram panchayats, these areas have access to basic resources such as electricity and water. However, what about knowledge, exposure, and most importantly, opportunities?
“I always said that to get India stronger, first strengthen its roots, and all our roots are our country's interiors, rural areas, and villages.” ~ Raveena Tandon
As part of the urban population, we often explore various career options through our social circles. We may know someone who is a designer, engineer, doctor, researcher, psychologist, writer, economist, chartered accountant, singer, dancer, or one of the many other niche professions that have become increasingly popular. We consume digital content to learn more about these career options and gain a basic understanding of them. Additionally, many students receive career counseling to identify their strengths and weaknesses and determine suitable career paths. These kids also consider several entrepreneurial options. However, what about children in rural areas of India?
Kids in rural areas of India have limited exposure to different career options. Many of them only know of a few professions such as policeman, teacher, farmer, or at most a few skilled trades such as electrician, plumber, or carpenter. Even professions such as doctors and engineers are sometimes unfamiliar to them. While these children have access to digital content, this content is curated to their interests, and career-related content rarely appears in their feeds. Additionally, since they may not understand the importance of exploring other career options, they may not actively seek out such content. Parents of these kids are not very supportive of them exploring or trying other career options.
Impact of Lack of Exposure to Career Options
The impact of limited career choices on children in rural India has two aspects. Firstly, because they aren't exposed to many options, they miss opportunities to learn about different careers and are unable to find careers that suit their skills. They have many talents they haven't discovered. Secondly, this shortage of career options affects how the country grows. Rural parts of India have lots of opportunities and several problems that need to be solved. These kids have a good understanding of these problems since they have seen these problems since their childhood. If they explore different careers and skills, they can improve their rural areas and solve various problems. This could open the door of entrepreneurship to these kids.
⚡ Implementing Design Thinking
Now, you must be wondering why we discussed so much about the limited exposure of career options to kids in the rural context of India. To teach design thinking to these kids, we need to get them to implement it. As we discussed earlier, design thinking is a method of solving problems. I feel that lack of exposure to career options is a good problem for the kids to start with because It is a problem that is unknown to them and is going to help them once solved.
The question that remains is, how do we implement design thinking?
Context
Even though the process of Design Thinking generally starts with empathizing, it is always good to understand the context first. Thus, the kids need to be introduced to a world beyond their village, a world where there are infinite possibilities and career options. Where people try to find an intersection between their passion and their skills to choose a career.
Phase I: Field of interests
Kids’ thought process can be triggered by asking if they know themselves well. Kids will have to understand and note down their hobbies, interests, and skills. The kids can be allowed to be as vague and wild as possible.
Phase II: Exploring a career
The kids can be introduced to various career options that might align with the interests that they jotted down. Now, how do the kids explore these fields? This is where the first phase of design thinking comes into the picture, empathize. Now the kids can achieve this with a combination of secondary and primary research. Secondary research would include reading books or articles and watching documentaries and movies. Kids can read autobiographies or biographies of people who have pursued their respective careers. Additionally, kids can watch a few movies or documentaries based on these careers or these people. This will help the kids get a rough idea about their careers. Apart from that the kids will get a better in-depth understanding of the career and its nuances after personally interacting with professionals who have chosen the particular career. The schools or teachers in rural areas might struggle a bit to get such connections, but if it is made possible, the kids will get a good amount of exposure.
After understanding these careers and the skills associated with these careers. The kids can make an action plan with the help of the school and their teachers, on how they will develop these skills to take a step towards a career of their choice.
It is important to understand that these choices may change over time, the kids can realize that they do not like a particular career option and thus might explore another one. They can also discuss with their peers and learn from them. This will allow these kids to explore various career options, by using design thinking. Although this might not allow the kids to implement the entire design thinking process, it might give them a good start. They can further implement the process in Project Based Learning.
✅ Project Based Learning
The project-based learning can be an extension of the earlier discussed process of identifying and exploring career options based on the interests of the kids. The kids can do a kind of role-play here, which would make the process fun for them. The kids can start by identifying several problems around them. It will be better if the kids can identify a range of small problems to start with. While playing the role of a profession within the career of their choice, the kids can choose a problem that they think they would be able to solve. The teachers can help the kids in doing so.
Further, the kids can try to understand the problem better by reading about it and interacting with people who face this problem. This is nothing but the empathize phase of the design thinking process. The kids can then define this problem based on their understanding. They can put this problem in writing so that they can refer to it while they think of solutions. Additionally, this problem should generally include the target audience, that is nothing but the people who face the problem or problems, and the cause of the problem.
The kids can start ideating. Kids can come up with the wildest possible solutions for the problems. They can write, sketch, and enact to communicate their ideas. The teachers and peers can give them feedback based on which the students can iterate. Finally, the kids can choose a solution which is best suited to solve the problem. The kids can prototype this solution using the means that are available and can ask people from the target audience to use it or check it out and give feedback. The kids can learn from the feedback and iterate again.
This process can be very intensive in actual life. But for the kids to just get a gist of the process, it can be made shorter as per the convenience of the school and teachers.
This will help the kids understand how to solve problems systematically. The kids can continue to identify and pick more such problems and solve them.
🏫 Design Thinking for Teachers
The design thinking process can also be implemented by teachers in their everyday teaching. Teachers can increase the involvement of the kids and also boost their understanding by doing so. The teachers can interestingly introduce the topics or chapters and then get the kids to understand a few things from the chapter themselves and build their hypotheses based on that. The teacher can then explain the concepts of the topic to them. The kids can also be asked to do a role-play to empathize with characters in subjects like history. Furthermore, the teacher can focus on problem-solving-oriented learning and grading of kids.