Last year, I wrote about the first Bootcamp Bootleg here, a compilation of materials and methods assembled by the team that teaches our introductory course on design thinking at the Stanford d.school, which we call Bootcamp. As with last year's model, you can download the latest version free, courtesy of the d.school. The team has outdone themselves this year, the content is just awesome -- fun to read, detailed, useful, and great pictures and drawings to guide and inspire anyone who is applying design thinking (from novices to veterans).
I love the opening paragraph:
Check this out —
It’s the d.school bootcamp bootleg.
This compilation is intended as an active toolkit to support your design thinking practice. The guide is not just to read – go out in the world and try these tools yourself. In the following pages, we outline each mode of a human centered design process, and then describe dozens of specific methods to do design work. These process modes and methods provide a tangible toolkit which support the seven mindsets — shown on the following page – that are vital attitudes for a design thinker to hold.
Then the fun begins. Here is the crisp summary of the d.school philosophy:
Show don't tell. Focus on human values. Craft clarity. Embrace experimentation. Be mindful of process. Bias toward action. Radical collaboration
Then it goes through the fives "modes" of the design process (By the way, note the term "mode" rather than "step" or stage" is important here because we never mean to convey that this is a clean and linear process):
Empathize. Define. Ideate. Prototype. Test.
To me,while philosophy and process are important, the real stuff, the material here that really makes the Bootleg so valuable, are the dozens of methods it contains. These have been tried and fine-tuned for the six or seven years the d.school has been around, and for decades before that at places including IDEO and the Stanford Product Design program. In d.school speak, these methods help you DO TO THINK. Here are a few samples, there are many more:
Assume a beginners mindset. Use a camera study. Interview for empathy. Extreme users. Team share and capture. Journey map. Empathy map. Fill-in-the blank character profile. Why-how laddering. Point-of-view want-ad. "How might we" questions. Stoke. Facilitate a brainstorm. Bodystorming. Impose constraints.
Try the Bootleg. You will like most of it -- and will probably get frustrated and fail along the way too. That's part of the process too. Please let us know what did and did not work for you. Let us know you changed or, as we say "flexed," these methods so they would work for you. And please let us know other methods you have used, and perhaps invented, to do design thinking
Once again, a big thanks to the team that developed the first cut at the Bootleg last year and the team that cranked0out this lovely revision.
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