Challenge & Selection

I am an entrepreneur looking for the right way to starting my business with children, to foster their  creativity. As I consider that actually most schools don’t offer enough space for children to develop  their creativity I have started a journey to investigate how I could offer an adequate program,  complementary to school, to my potential customers.

Since during my investigations and observations I have collected so much information, it starts  getting very complex to organise all the data and to rank by importance for my clients. Therefore, I  need a Design Thinking tool for translating the observations I have been doing along my way into  insights.

The tool that I consider suits best in this case is the Mind-mapping tool. My expectation is to find the  most creative ideas and get the necessary insights from all stakeholders involved in the process in  order to define correctly the design criteria, which my solution has to offer to solve my customer’s  problem.

Application

For the rollout of the mind-mapping tool I have decided to use the parents’ cafeteria of the school.  There I hanged a big picture drawn by me, according to the visual thinking tool, to visualize the  problem I identified. Additionally I printed several interesting graphs and data regarding creativity of  children, their development and also some interesting data about the evolution in the educational  system in our country and hang all these papers on the cafeteria’s walls. Then I invited some parents,  teenagers and teacher to come and visit my showroom. Their role was to put their comments and  reflexions for giving ideas of solving the problem on some sticky notes. After having written all their  comments, the stakeholders had some time to sit at the cafeteria’s tables and organise and group  their notes by topics. I divided the parents, teachers and teenagers into two groups for sharing  among them. In group 1, a mother started sharing her ideas and comments to all the information she  had observed in my little « art gallery ». She commented on my visual map and on the graphs I had  printed. The group helped her to organise her sticky notes by topics and stick them on a big white  paper I had stuck on the wall. Group 2 would do the same after presenting their ideas first  individually. The next step I asked them to do, was to try to give a heading to each of the topics they  had identified. They should convert the observations into insights and draw the connections between  these different insights. So both groups ended up with two different mind maps, but still very similar.   The exercise had been effective and given two rich outputs.

Insight &Approach

What I have learned during this workshop I organised is that the showroom helped the stakeholders  to be really inside the problem, to be surrounded by it and to get inspired through all the  accumulation of information I had collected and made visible to them in one big room. It is  sometimes very important to visualise things in order to activate the right part of the brain that

thinks more creative instead of staying just analytical. In conclusion, Design Thinking helped me to  get all the necessary insights to set up my business accordingly, being able to take into account all  the needs of my future customers.  Involving not just the parents, but also some teachers and  teenagers helped to give very diverse points of view. The teachers representing the actual education  system and knowing the limitations of it and the teenagers representing the students and their  frustrations and wishes. Therefore I consider the mind-mapping tool has been the right tool to be  used in my case. I love the concept of co-creating the future of our children!

