Designing with Empathy

Rather than diving straight into a building project, eighth grade Creator 2 students have been focusing on design thinking this month by tackling a challenge to redesign an element of the Fay campus or program to make it more accessible. Instead of jumping immediately into ideation, students took a thoughtful, deliberate approach—gathering information, analyzing feedback, and weighing the opportunities and priorities behind each problem before developing solutions.

Because empathy is a central part of design thinking, Design Teacher Deborah Morrone-Bianco asked students to use the Fay Design Process to identify an aspect of Fay —physical or procedural —that poses an accessibility challenge. Their goal: to reimagine and improve the design to make it more usable, inclusive, and welcoming for everyone.

Each student chose an area of campus to focus on, such as the CC&D, Fay athletics, or campus safety. To gather information, each student was tasked with interviewing a Fay faculty or staff member to gain insight into the challenges different people might encounter on campus in their chosen area of focus. Before meeting with their chosen faculty or staff member, students practiced interviews with a partner in class, building confidence and learning how to lead an organized, meaningful conversation. They crafted thoughtful, open-ended questions and practiced listening carefully, asking follow-ups to dig deeper into the issues. After their interviews, students teamed up with a peer working on the same focus area to analyze responses and create problem statements that reflect a sharpened understanding of the challenges they hope to address.

Students explored their problem statements using two tools that helped them think like designers. First, students group challenges using a Problem Priority Matrix that organizes problems into quadrants based on how many people they affect and how often they occur. Then, using a similarly formatted Opportunity Priority Matrix, students considered which problems would be easiest to tackle and which solutions could have the greatest impact, identifying the most actionable and impactful problems. “These steps give them additional support in determining priorities and choosing which problems they should focus on,” says Deborah. 

The next step in the process will be to design a solution —a traditional prototype or an enhanced process —to present to the class. Students are already inspired by some of last year’s students who proposed improvements to the waitering system at meals and will be presenting their ideas to Head of School Susanna Waters this fall.