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Activity: The Layers of Design

Learning Goal: To help learners of any age see the web of connections embedded in our lives.

Understanding the layers of design helps us to understand the how and why behind a product or thing; once we see the layers we can start to selectively unsee to reveal new ideas.

Activity: Your Love Is Like a Red Red Rose

Learning Goal: To help learners uncover their values, develop self-awareness and independent thinking, build creative confidence, enhance motivation, and strengthen their moral compass.

Your values influence your behavior and motivate your actions — the ones you take and the ones you don’t take. By airing your values, you have the opportunity to examine and evolve your sense of purpose as you gain experience and wisdom.

Activity: The No-Build Hack

Learning Goals: To help learners use improvisation to help them understand an idea, concept, or motivation. To help them deepen curiosity, let go of perfection, and explore for the sake of learning.

How do you close the gap between I wonder and I know? You make a prototype. A prototype is a tool that gives you a chance to investigate your ideas and explore what could, should, or would come next, whether you are designing a new product, working out a new routine, or rearranging your furniture.

Activity: Desktop Data Shuffle

Learning Goal: To help learners understand how to organize information and look at data through multiple lenses. To help them develop critical thinking, observation, sensemaking, and creative problem-solving skills.

Data surrounds us, and building basic data visualization skills is a critical competency for every student. This activity walks you through how to take data from your backpack, purse, desktop, or kitchen cabinet and use different frameworks to sort it and find new relationships and possibilities.

Activity: What Are Your Attitudes toward Ambiguity?

Learning Goal: To help learners understand their personal reaction when faced with ambiguous challenges. To help them develop self-awareness, creative confidence, and problem-solving skills.

Ambiguity gives you permission to be creative. Which is a good thing, right? But ambiguity also evokes associations with something being unsettled, unclear, and frustrating. So how do you respond when faced with ambiguity?

Activity: Do a Duchamp

Learning Goal: To help learners develop creative thinking skills. To help them develop divergent thinking, confidence in their creative abilities, a bias to action, and brainstorming skills.

Possibility is about the ability to see something in your imagination or in your heart and materialize it in real life. Unbeknownst to us, our imagination is limited by what we already know. Don’t let your default (your unconscious biases) hold you back! This activity will help you practice letting go of what you know so that you can see new possibilities.

Activity: The Ladder of Meaning

Learning Goal: To help learners develop their ability to move from concrete to abstract.

When you get stuck trying to solve a problem, you’re most likely trying to solve the wrong problem. By moving between the concrete and the abstract, you can discover which problems are a better fit for what you want to achieve. This activity activates your imagination and divergent thinking so you can expand your abilities to make sense of the world.

Activity: Write an Internal Op-Ed

Learning Goal: To help learners understand their values so they can stand up for what they believe in. To help them develop self-awareness, courage in the face of fear or uncertainty, and the agency to spark change.

This activity is a tool to both clarify your values (to yourself) and advocate for (to your community, company or organization) what you stand for.

Activity: Know Your Positionality and Develop Critical Awareness

Learning Goal: To help learners know who they are as changemakers and how to understand where change is needed. To help them develop self-awareness, agency, and empathy.

This activity challenges you to develop a positionality statement and fine tune your critical awareness.

Activity: Emotional Journey Map

Learning Goal: To help learners understand their feelings of belonging and othering. To help them develop self-awareness, confidence, and the agency to spark change.

Feelings of belonging are powerful. Belonging is a real factor in having the confidence to believe in oneself and in one’s ability to do hard things. This activity is a great starting point for anyone who wants to think about belonging.

Activity: The Gifts to Goals Canvas

Learning Goal: To help learners better understand their own values, how to connect with their networks, and create practices in their lives that allow them to both work and reflect.

How can we bring our creative ingenuity to the challenges in the world today and not just do what might be expected of us?

Our educators’ guides help teachers in higher ed and K-12 facilitate activities from our d.school books.

Activity: The Secret Handshake

Learning Goal: To help learners of any age connect with their peers and bond as a group. 

Before you work with someone else, or ask students to work with each other in a creative way, it helps if everyone is comfortable with each other. You need to connect on a human level. This activity is all about quickly creating the conditions for collaboration–it’s also a good reminder that playfulness opens us up.