All of the 6th-8th Middle School students built upon their summer reading and blog entries during the “Water” project. Because most of the students had experience with the Design Thinking process last year, we emphasized the “Research/Deep Dive” portion in this project.

The student in the top photo is working with his team to “Look below the surface” of what users said about their water usage during student interviews. Each team used an Empathy Map to help them record what they thought were the users’ thoughts and feelings. This is an abstract step, which stretched our middle students to go beyond the concrete observations and words, to infer the underlying meanings.

Using these Empathy Maps, students identified a particular user, a particular need, and an insight to help them focus their design work. Water usage is a huge, global issue and some of the Middle School students expressed some concerns about what was being asked of them. “Everyone needs water. I’m used to knowing everything about something, and 'Water' is so big that I can’t.” We will work more in future projects to emphasize that our goal is to address a portion of a huge topic, and that even solving a small part will make a difference in the world.