“Outstanding tool for design thinking” — Diane Farrug, Charlotte, NC |
InGlobal’s Design Mindset Cards have been developed to help individuals, groups, or teams interested in using a design thinking process to inform project work, solve open-ended problems, and come up with innovative solutions to challenges of all kinds. The deck contains thought-provoking and playful prompts, questions, and ideas to help you generate better choices and make better decisions. Each deck includes Discover, Frame, Imagine, Prototype, Engage, and Reflect cards which can be used in order or randomly as needed, plus Spark cards that describe small activities which can be used at any time to rejuvenate creativity. Guideline and glossary cards round out a deck of 84 cards in all.
Design Mindset Cards can support challenges like:
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Cards in this category help you learn about the situation and the people involved. The Discover cards provide you with a framework to explore a real world situation, challenge, or problem from the perspective of your users. Questions and prompts are provided that help you to flare your thinking and help you find out as much as possible about the situation, the people the challenge affects, and everything around the challenge. The cards in this category allow you to collect information and build understanding about the users, with a focus on empathy.
The Frame cards to help you define the problem based on the information you gathered during the Discover phase. These cards provide you with a step by step process to follow during this phase as you develop a design board, user persona and point of view statement.
These cards guide you as you work toward inventing potential solutions, processes or approaches to your challenge. The Imagine cards provide you with questions and prompts to aid brainstorming. The first cards in the set help you to “flare” your thinking and the subsequent cards assist you as you “focus” your thinking on one feasible, delightful, and breakthrough solution. The “flare” cards help you create choices and the “focus” cards help you make choices.
The Prototype cards to help you “do the experiment” – actually create a mockup of your potential solution, process, or approach to your challenge. These cards provide options for creating a rough and ready model or representation of your idea. These types of quick mockups help us “fail faster to succeed sooner” in the design process. Each card provides an example of a way you can very quickly mockup your idea using easily obtainable materials so you can get feedback on your idea before investing a lot of resources into the design.
The Engage cards are designed to help you share your work with others and hear their feedback. The process of receiving feedback about your prototype allows you to make improvements to your design. Each of the Engage cards provides prompts or questions so that the feedback provided will meaningfully impact your work and encourage you to explore your ideas more deeply.
These cards help you think about, and make changes to, your idea. Each Reflect card provides ways to analyze the feedback you received and iterate to make improvements based o the feedback you received. When you use a design mindset approach you can expect to go through several cycles, or iterations, of prototyping, engaging, and reflecting in order to come up with a solution to a challenge.
The Spark cards describe small activities to help inspire or rejuvenate your creativity. Each Spark card contains an activity designed to allow you to quickly move through a creative process to expand your thinking and refresh your perspectives. The activities can be used at any point during the design thinking process if you are stuck, need a new idea, or just want to try out something different.
InGlobal Design Mindset CARDS were originally designed as an Institute for Innovation in Education initiative in collaboration with Wholemindesign.