Design Thinking Script: Capstone Part One

Two things about this assignment are easy to miss and both change what you write. First, it is a script — words you will speak over a presentation in Week Six — so it should sound like speech. Short sentences, one idea each, no subordinate clauses that lose their thread when read aloud, and language a listener can follow without rereading. Prose written for the eye reads badly in a voice-over and the difference is audible immediately. Second, this is Part One of your capstone, so the topic you choose here is one you will live with for the rest of the course. Choose an area you can access, where you have some standing to observe, and where an improvement is genuinely possible — not the largest problem in your organisation, which is usually the one you have least ability to affect. Pick something you could still be talking about in Week Six without embarrassment.

The supplied stems give you the structure and they map onto the early stages of design thinking. 'During this course, I came across x' is the empathise stage: what you learned about a user's actual experience rather than about a system's design. 'I see opportunity for improvement at my organization in x' is the define stage, and it should name a problem rather than a solution, because a problem stated as a missing solution has already foreclosed the ideation. Narrowing to one to three areas is the assignment's own instruction and it is doing real work, since a capstone with four focus areas becomes a survey. Then the end user question, which is where consumer-centrism enters: name the actual person who experiences the problem — a patient waiting, a nurse re-entering data, a family calling for information — and say what changes for them specifically. An improvement whose beneficiary is 'the organisation' has not been through a design thinking lens at all.