Yesterday was our first class. Dr. Rhine gave an overview of the types of clinicians we will be studying in the NICU, the various medical interventions they perform, and a bit about Family/Patient-Centered Care.
Our 20 fantastic students have already begun to learn the design thinking process through our first activity: The Oral Hygiene Challenge. Check out our “Student Projects” tab here to read more about the project, and see what students came up with for their partners. We chose this activity to introduce students to design thinking because we felt it was an intimate subject that might be uncomfortable to talk about with a stranger, and could lead to highly personal solutions. After the activity was over, students displayed their prototypes on a table with their POV. Everyone had a chance to present their solution for their partner based on their insights. We debriefed about the experience for a few minutes at the end of the class and discussed some concerns about the challenge:
• Self-consciousness: giving one’s partner an answer to a question they thought would be “well accepted,” or that they thought their partner “wanted to hear.”
• The temptation to create “leading questions” rather than “open-ended questions” on the interviewer’s part.
• The limitations we created with time. (Every phase was between 4-12 minutes).
• The limitations of the classroom environment. Obviously, students could not see/study the subject’s actual environment where they perform oral hygiene, and therefore some students felt unsure about their partner’s responses to questions. “We had to take their word for it.”
These are exactly the kinds of thoughts/feelings I hoped students would experience during this process. It allows us to move into our next phase about observation, and crafting questions for a field guide to test the validity of our inferences.