GT Block Showcase Preparations and the Design Thinking Process

By Aaron Rubenstein

            At the end of each year, Innovation Academy holds an annual Showcase. Appropriately, the event highlights the efforts of students in their projects throughout the year. A primary element of the event are the projects constructed by GT Block students.

            This year, freshman enrolled in GT Block have been given a list of prompts and the ability to solve serious local, national, and global problems using the techniques learned throughout the previous two semesters.

The Design Thinking Process is a formula applied by students and professionals to design a product. This process involves five steps:

  1. Empathize

The first step is to gain an understanding of the issue at hand. Before anything, the student must establish connections with experts and create a rich gallery of resources to inform them of their situation.

  • Define

After empathize, the student must identify their path ahead. The student creates personas to reveal the real impacts of their problem, fleshes out the steps to achieving some kind of end-product, creating criteria to judge future prototypes against.

  • Ideate

This step involves the student in actual brainstorming for solutions. Based on the criteria made in the last step, the student draws out potential solutions.

  • Prototype

Here, the student creates physical prototypes, storyboards, and/or mockups to test different designs. By the end of this step, the student will have tested each prototype and adopt one to progress into the next step.

  • Implement

Now that the student has tested their prototype, his/her final task is to implement it. This can mean materializing the final product and putting it to use, testing a user interface on a real audience, or even transferring over to someone that can implement it (i.e., public official, professional, etc.).

            The entirety of this process has been learned by each GT Block student and is now being practiced in their final project purposed for display in the Showcase.

The event will take place in the hangar Thursday afternoon (5/18) for business partners and Friday morning (5/19) for the community.

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