The Art of Asking Questions: Adopting Critical-Design Thinking in the Digitalisation of Solutions

The new world facing us, demands skillful thinkers to come up with new ways of living and new solutions to world’s greatest problems. Of late, these include efforts to integrate design innovation and digitalization, which arguably cannot take place in the absence of critical thinking. The latter is integral to effective design thinking as it is used to design the products of the modern world, the environments people inhabit, and even the social interactions that people engage in. Young gradates and professionals are increasingly tasked to leverage on the affordances of technology to resolve complex problems in interdisciplinary team-based projects. Hence, the intentional integration of critical thinking (CT) and design thinking (DT) skills become particularly crucial. After all, it is bad design if every and any digital tool is assumed to be capable of meaningfully resolving real world, often multifaceted problems. This highly interactive 1.5-hour workshop will bring participants through a series of short activities to apply CT-DT tools with a human-centered mindset to understand key challenges of an identified authentic problem. Participants will learn the art of asking good questions so as to gain deeper insights. The workshop will be contextualized in either (i) Human Health Potential or (ii) Resource and Environmental Sustainability. Participants will be engaged in group activities to ideate for digitalization strategies in resolving issues of (i) establishing social connectedness in virtual communication; or (ii) food security challenges in times of crisis. It is aimed that the workshop will bring awareness to participants the importance of understanding the relationship between critical thinking and design thinking when ideating for digital solutions to solve real world problems. Also, critical thinking needs to be more explicitly integrated into the design innovation process in order to ensure that design efforts maximize potential benefits and minimize potential harms to society.