LDE learners from across different year groups, as well as staff members, joined forces with Fujitsu for a Design Thinking workshop to create a college wellbeing app. 

The session began with the following challenge:  
At the college, we take our learner and staff wellbeing very seriously and, despite having several methods in place- we’re not certain that these methods are benefitting learners and staff, and they do not provide the immediate support that is sometimes needed.  

Through Fujitsu's version of Design Thinking called HXD (Human Centric Experience Design), our learners undertook a 6-hour workshop to try and resolve this. 

After an exciting warm up, learners, staff and Fujitsu representatives were split into teams to work through various discussion exercises. Our visitors facilitated an open inclusive environment, where learner’s and staff’s experiences and opinions were shared. Among the different exercises, learners showed great empathy and emotional intelligence during the persona pen portrait activity. The persona pen portrait is a description of different individuals including staff, learners and parents. Through reading and discussing these descriptions, learners considered how the challenge would affect each individual.

After exploring the challenge in depth, the session moved onto vision creation where each team began to generate a vision for the future that formulated their target/goal for a solution.

We then moved onto the Idea creation process where individuals had 5 minutes of silent brainstorming to generate as many individual ideas as possible to resolve the challenge. Thanks to the exercises throughout the day unleashing the creativity in the room, in just five 5 minutes the whole group generated in excess of 90 individual ideas! These ideas were discussed and categorised in each team. The teams then worked on concept development, where teams worked together to create a concept canvas identifying how their concept specifically solved the challenge.

The final task of the day was requirement gathering where the whole group were asked to identify elements that were crucial, like to have or aspirational. Through this exercise, the developers will be able to identify the key elements that needed to be concentrated for the well-being app.  

In just one day working with Fujitsu, we have made great strides towards bettering well-being in the LDE community, but this is only the beginning. We want everyone who is a part of LDE to share how a college well-being can help address their individual experiences.

If you would like to have your opinion heard, please fill out this short questionnaire.