what they don’t teach you in classrooms!
the BGU Open Apartments Program Design Thinking Workshop, September 2011
the makers and shakers
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Maayan Arbiv, Nuclear Engineering Lior Bouzgan, Materials Engineering Adi Cohen, Education Matanya Gill, Middle East Studies Sara Tal Kalman, Emergency Medicine Nilu Pauchman, Biotechnology Engineering Keren Robbins, Geological and Environmental Sciences
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getting the process started
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the background:
Ben-Gurion University runs a diverse range of programs from its Community Action Unit. One program supports students given housing in the poorer communities of Beer Sheva and in exchange they have to spend 8 hours/week on social activities inside their community. They call it the “Open Apartments Program”. Our team: 3 people from university staff, 7 makers and shakers – students – who are involved in the open apartments program, and us. Our goal: To co-create a storyboard during a design thinking workshop for a video on the open apartments program and to produce video footage. The core message of the video: “Community involvement teaches you what they don’t teach in classrooms!”
WE used one of the oldest “design thinking processes” described in “The Universal Traveler” from 1973. WE adapted this process to our needs by changing the “implementation” into the “prototyping” phase to emphasize experiment and hands-on.
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design thinking
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PHASE 1: ANALYZE The 1st phase is often skipped and people rush to the “more creative” phases of ideation and prototyping. But as Einstein said: “If I only had an hour to solve a problem and my life would depend on it, I’d devote the first 55 minutes to figuring out the right question to answer.” That’s what WE did in our workshop. We were trying to achieve a common understanding of the “Open Apartments Program” by asking the following questions: • How is the program embedded in the university? • How is it supported by the university? • What motivates the students to take part in the program? • What are the benefits for the students? For the university? For the community?
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“Community involvement teaches you what they don’t teach in classrooms! The university of life is out there!”
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PHASE 2: DEFINE Our define process started with the central assumption: “Social skills are as important as academic skills to become a ‘complete’ human being.” For 1.5 days WE were working in multiple feedback loops breaking this assumption down into an easy to understand key message. Shifting between small working groups and all participants WE defined and decided upon the video’s core message: “Community involvement teaches you what they don’t teach in classrooms! The university of life is out there!” This message became the guideline for all our further activities.
work in progress
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PHASE 3: IDEATE This phase was all about creating a pool of fresh and surprising ideas. Each and every idea was welcome! WE asked for ‘unlimited’ imagination. Our goal: transform the text based core message into lively picts, sounds and audio. At this point everybody became excited. Finally all the students’ ideas were unleashed: • • • • • •
What would the intro look like? Whom to shoot? Which neighborhoods to show? Which music to use? Which slogans to integrate? Which wording to include?
Each single picture, audio, text should transfer the video’s core message.
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PHASE 4: SELECT Next step: select the best ideas and create a storyboard out of them. To visualize the storyboard we provided a timeline including 3 different layers: written text, picture and audio (spoken word / music / sounds). The students developed in 2 teams the very first drafts. All together â&#x20AC;&#x201C; wisdom of the crowd â&#x20AC;&#x201C; WE decided which draft to go on and optimized it. At the end of the day we had a complete storyboard laid out in 3 layers (written text, picture and audio). This marked also a milestone within the process: the students imagining for the very first time how the video might look.
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PHASE 5: PROTOTYPE Prototyping in our case meant preparing and going out to film. Day 3: None of the students had ever done anything like this before. But they scouted the locations, organized the equipment and found other students to get involved. They rehearsed professors and students in their classrooms over and over again until the scene was to their satisfaction. Two of them even took the camera home and filmed their adopted Arab family while cooking and eating.
in the editorsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; suite
PHASE 6: EVALUATE It turned out, WE all had done a great job during our workshop! It was easy to follow our script and the storyboard. There were only a few confusing moments. What the evaluation made obvious, text and audio were our weak points â&#x20AC;&#x201C; but still on a pretty high level ;-)
... the film
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http://youtu.be/US2EVdbUsis
Ulrike Reinhard Faehrweg 2 69239 Neckarhausen +49 6229 93 07 06 we@we-magazine.net we-magazine.net