STMT KIT – Kareem Dimitrious Collie

PROJECT TITLE :

STMT:
Design Thinking Studio @ the d.school

Portraits Of Obama: Media, Fidelity, and the 44th President

Using Obama as a prism, this essay examines the culture of American mass media, examining the fidelity of news content amongst the ever-growing, ever-fragmenting, modern media landscape. It investigates the audience’s active engagement in the construction of their relationship to reality, the flawed nature of newsmakers and their perceptions of the world, and offers an alternative narrative approach to the construction of the self.

PROJECT SUMMARY :

The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (the d.school) is a center at Stanford University that focuses on researching, practicing, and developing a design philosophy called “design thinking”. I was a Teaching Fellow at the center August 2016 - Sept 2017. As a team of three, the teaching fellows explored new methods of teaching design thinking. We outlined a new curriculum and taught this revised curriculum to a diverse class of 30+ graduate students.

The framework we developed called See, Think, Make, Tell (STMT)— drew on our diverse individual experiences and orientations to design. STMT was ultimately made into a self-guided tool kit that celebrates the unique perspective each person brings to a team and to design, while also offering team members and collaborators insight into each person's unique position on the team.

PROJECT TYPE :

Orientation: Design Researcher +
Design Educator
Project type: Curriculum + Toolkit Design

PARTNERSHIP :

The d.school @ Stanford University

DESIGN THINKING @ The d.school

REPACKAGING DESIGN THINKING
My team of fellows repackaged the d.school's Design Thinking framework based on the qualities that an individual designer brings to their engagement with the world — Seeing, Thinking, Making, and Telling.

2016-17 TEACHING FELLOW
The public presentation of such intimate information is sitting at the boundaries of public and private from a western perspective yet gives insights into familial roles, responsibilities, and expectations. Highlighting challenges to these roles from the intimate nature of the nuclear family to the macro perspective of China’s changing post-communist culture and it’s a rapid shift to urban life.

STMT: THE 2017 DESIGN THINKING STUDIO

We were tasked with developing a semester-long curriculum around this new repackaging for students at Stanford University. The class brought students together from the School of Business, Journalism, Medicine, Performance, and Engineering.

We worked with the students to implement this framework with project partners from several industries—from wellness and k-12 education, to fashion and art.

Seeing is about being hyperaware. Take the time to engage all your senses and deeply observe what is occurring beyond the surface.

Thinking is about internalizing information and generating a point of view. Learn how to navigate and process information to distill meaning.

Making is about giving form to an idea. Practice shaping content and generating tangible outputs to elicit feedback for improvement.

Telling is about conveying a story from a unique perspective. Craft narratives that represent your work to showcase your point of view and drive conviction.

METHOD CARDS

We designed this set of cards as CliffsNotes for some of the larger ideas of the deck, detailing specific methods for engaging the design framework.

TEAM COHESION KIT

Every team has its challenges. As designers working with other designers, it’s especially challenging because while we are trained to be open-minded, we’re also often expected to approach problems with a strong point of view. When this works well teams unite to create a powerful cocktail of creativity. When this doesn’t work well it yields disparate

voices and little, if any, collaboration. Our experience as designers working as a team of Teaching Fellows surfaced challenges that led us to consider—how might we help individuals unite to become a more cohesive team?

Read the full case study on
www.dschool.stanford.edu