Design Thinking for App Developers

Today the App Design project week kicked off with some very productive planning, learning, and designing. We began the day not with code and jpegs, but imagining the design needs of common everyday items. Students engaged in design thinking, as pioneered by Stanford University's d-school.

Students discuss the problems with wallets, bicycles, and plates 

before designing solutions on paper or InDesign

Discussion was animated, and the results were... ambitious: a wifi-hotspot wallet that knows its owner; boots that are waterproof from the outside but not the inside; a bicycle that is really a motorcycle (sometimes, you invent something that someone else already got to - it happens).

And that was just the warm-up! Now it is time to learn some code and write some Apps!