Module 6: Design Thinking

Welcome to Week 6, and to Part III, where the course makes it real in the field. Last week you learned to interrogate a problem. This week you learn a discipline for staying close to the people who have it: design thinking. The phrase to carry all week is empathize before you solve. Most people, handed a problem, leap straight to answers. Design thinking makes you slow down at the front end and understand the person and their situation deeply first, because a solution built without that understanding usually solves the wrong thing beautifully.

Here is the Seminar's central question from this week's angle: do we find, unearth, or create value? Aimed at design thinking, it sharpens into this: value shows up in the meeting between a solution and a real person's real situation, so how do you come to understand that situation well enough to see where value would actually land? You cannot design value for a person you have not taken the time to understand.

By Sunday you will have two things: a question bank of ten to twenty questions you would ask real people about your problem, and a set of audience categories, the groups you will sort those people into. Together they are the toolkit you carry into next week, when customer discovery begins and you start talking to real people.

If you are joining this week, you have lost texture, not prerequisite knowledge. You need one thing to start: a problem and a rough sense of who has it. Design thinking is a stance you can pick up fresh. One real dependency does close this week, though, and it is flagged in section 03: your Baker "AI employee" track needs to be complete by the end of this module, because customer discovery next week reuses the agent-building form Baker teaches. The "Ask Wren" panel can help if you are behind. Wren Calloway is your course concierge.