LIBRARY UPDATE: “Trying to Empathize to Design”

Learning how to design is more then putting a cube next to a sphere and printing it out. Design takes knowing who were designing for. This week we asked our FabSlam team to interview our role playing VISTA Jesse Hunt as a janitor to design him an ideal key management system. We learned a lot during this process. It is much harder to teach empathy then first imagined. Trying to get the students to dig deeper and walk a mile in our janitor’s shoes in order to design for him rather then only get the key management contraints is a challenge. It was a great first effort down this road so that when it comes time to use this method in solving our transportation problem for the FabSlam challenge, we’ll be ready.

Check out some highlights of the youth sketching, designing, and rapid prototyping!