Hello. I'm Daisy Azer,
also a co-author of Design Thinking for the Greater Good.
I like to think that I've spent my career helping
clients to succeed with roles in both business development,
and training and development,
as both entrepreneur and employee,
often working with startups.
My professional and educational paths have led me to
design thinking as a particularly effective tool when solving human-centered,
and persistently wicked and complex problems.
I currently serve as adjunct lecturer for the Darden online design picking courses,
which is a role I greatly appreciate as I can both share
my learning as well as continue to expand my learning alongside peers.
Travel with me to the UK where I'd like to walk you
through the four questions in our design thinking methodology.
What is, what if,
what wows, and what works,
using the example of an extraordinary organization, the Kingwood trust.
The Kingwood story starts with a determined mother in the United Kingdom,
Dame Stephanie Shirley, who decided to ask a different question.
Her son, Giles, was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.
As Giles grew to adulthood,
he needed care that his parents alone could not provide.
In fact, this lack of facilities for adults with autism is a global problem.
With no alternative available at the time,
Giles' parents were forced to hospitalize him in an institution where,
in Stephanie's own words,
there were probably zoos in Britain where
the quality of the inmate's lives was a higher policy priority.
She saw that caregivers had given up all hope of helping patients to lead better lives.
Instead, she said, they were kept alive and physically
safe but had been deprived of most of their human rights.
But Stephanie saw an opportunity that others did not,
and in 1994, she founded the Kingwood trust,
a UK charity dedicated to pioneering best practices to
help people with autism and Asperger's syndrome live full and active lives.
From its founding, Kingwood chose to deliberately reframe the question they asked.
They moved away from focusing only on safety and security to commit to a higher bar,
designed with a goal of growth and development.
That new framing of the question opened up
a completely different innovation conversation.
Fast forward to today where Kingwood has incorporated
design thinking into the core of their strategy.
Over the last seven years,
they have identified a series of areas for
redesign that touched the lives of people with autism.
Beginning with the design of independent housing,
moving onto the design of outdoor green spaces,
and then addressing personal tasks of daily living
such as making a sandwich or vacuuming a carpet.
Despite the challenge of developing a deep understanding of
people who often have limited speech and additional learning disabilities,
these individuals with autism, support staff,
and their families have been invited into the design process as active participants.
As a result, Kingwood has succeeded in developing new design standards and
inclusion practices that have become influential throughout the United Kingdom.
The cumulative impact of these initiatives has dramatically
improved the ability of those they support to lead more independent lives.
And in Kingwood's own words,
help people with autism live the lives they choose.
Their design thinking journey began when Kingwood partnered with a design consultancy,
Being, and the Helen Hamlin Center for Design at the Royal College of Art.
Katie Gaudian, a PhD student at the Royal College of Art, joined the team.
She brought a passion for understanding how people engage with the sensory qualities of
the environment and for enriching the lives
of people with neuro-developmental conditions.
The team moved beyond merely removing
the pain points we talk so much about in design and instead,
they set out to conduct studies aimed at exploring an individual's sensory preferences,
special interests, and capabilities to create points of joy and learning and development.
The team engaged a broad group of residents, staff,
and family to gather data and identify insights in the what-is phase.
They used co-creation to generate ideas in
the what-if phase and then tested them during what-wows and what-works.
Their extensive use of
the design tool visualization in many forms ranging from prototyping to story boarding,
not merely in the testing process but also as an important part of the discovery phase,
was critical in helping to surface insights that the participants with autism,
support staff, and family members might not have recognized or articulated otherwise.
Now, let's take a look at how Kingwood worked through
the four questions of the design thinking process.
