“People need a change in lighting because they walk to the right” – Using Design-based Learning with Museum Teens

A couple of weeks after shifting to more of a design focus in the Neanderthal Next Door program, we tried an ideation activity with the youth called a “Point-of-View Madlib.” (Remember Mad Libs?) Taken from Stanford d.school’s “Bootcamp Bootleg” deck of design-thinking cards, this activity is meant to help a group reach a point-of-view (POV) that can “[reframe]… a design challenge into an actionable problem statement that will launch [them] into generative ideation.” Or, in slightly less jargon-y terms…

We asked students to fill in values for the following categories: “Users,” “User Needs,” and “Surprising Insight.” The raw material for these values was to be taken from the observations that students had been doing of visitors to the Hall of Human Origins over the past few weeks. Here’s the values the class ended up with:

Once we had at least half a dozen values for each category, we asked students to do some Madlibbing with the results by filling in values for the following: “[USER] needs to [USER’S NEED] because [SURPRISING INSIGHT].” Here are the statements some students came out with:

• “Most people need a change in lighting or guide because they walk to to right.”
• “Parents need interactives to relay info to their kids.”
• “Young couples need something to direct their attraction to the scientific concepts presented because they are self-absorbed.”
• “Young adults and teens need to something to relate to themselves because they are self-absorbed.”
• “People younger than 30 who like taking photos need purpose, higher-level engagement strategies because they’re self-absorbed.”
• “People younger than 30 who like taking photos need something to direct their attraction to the scientific concepts presented because they only look at pictures.”
• “College students need purpose, higher-level engagement strategies because they’re self-absorbed.”
• “Young adults and teens need purpose, higher-level engagement strategies because they’re only interested in the brain panels.”

Pretty interesting, I think, that this group of 12th-graders ended up Madlibbing so many statements that depicted young people as self-absorbed! (Do such observations count as metacognition?)

Ultimately, we didn’t end up with a huge variety of POVs, unfortunately, but the activity did seem to work as a way to bridge the empathy-generating work of the hall observations with what we were planning to have the group start thinking about next–developing a design vision for their project.

With just a minute or so left in the time we had allotted for this activity, I wanted to have students respond in a less serious-minded way. (They’re called Madlibs, after all!) Almost before I finished getting the sentence out of my mouth asking the group to give me their most ridiculous-sounding statement, one student student came out with :

“Old people need a change in lighting or guide because the DNA panel is romantic.”

If we ever do this POV Madlib activity with a program again, maybe we should take a good five minutes for this take on the process…!

Combining this activity with a number of other design-based activities, the group came up with an impressive list of Design Principles. In the sessions since we have often found ourselves returning to these Principles to keep us on track:

One series of activities they based these on were observations of people in the Hall. For example, the youth followed visitors and mapped movement through the room while writing down things they overheard or observed: