We’re All Design Thinkers

Over the past decade, Design Thinking has quickly progressed from being a focus only in specific industries to being fundamental in the successful operation of multi-national businesses and government organisations.

Our future is being shaped and challenged in ways it has never been before. We take pride in the fact that we are educating today’s students to be tomorrow’s critical thinkers, risk-takers, and creative visionaries who can think outside of the box and solve problems with deep empathy.

Toorak College’s forward-thinking curriculum is skills-focused and industry-relevant, and this year we introduced Agile Learning, a new subject for Year 7 and 8 students. Design Thinking is the cornerstone of Agile Learning, and as such, is the framework the students implement as they work towards finding potential solutions for realworld problems. Using the five-stage process; empathise, investigate, ideate, prototype, and present, students collaborate in small groups throughout term long projects.

This year, students applied the principles of design thinking to create a UX (user experience) for their clients and for our Year 8 students, their clients were our 4 year old Pre-Prep children. After completing research by attending Pre-Prep classes, they worked to develop products and activities that considered the psychology of UX as well as the developmental stages of their clients.

“The UX project with the Pre-Preps helped us improve on our communication skills and teamwork. To best understand how to communicate with 4 year olds, and get some ideas for our project, we went down and visited them in their classrooms. We collected information by asking them questions and we used the answers to these questions, and our observations, to inform us on how we could best develop and present our UX (user experience) design. Agile Learning has been a great experience and the skills we are learning will definitely come in handy in the future.” Amelie S, Year 8

"Agile Learning takes your imagination to the next level and makes sure your mind is open to new ideas and concepts. You get to make your own choices and spread new ideas." Bethany W, Year 8

Design thinking is equipping our students with the skills to strategise and find solutions to complex problems and, ultimately, reshape the world. We can’t wait to see them do it!

Mrs Kate Brown - Curriculum Design & Implementation Leader (Year 7-9)