Design Thinking and Collaborative Digital Platforms: Innovative Tools for Co-creating Sustainability Solutions

Design thinking, which emphasizes users’ needs and rapid prototyping, is a promising avenue in the field of sustainability. Used by international organizations such as IDEO.org and d.School, design thinking has yielded promising results in terms of sustainability solutions. Employed at strategic moments during the design thinking process, digital tools (ICT) can also facilitate the collaborative and co-constructive aspects of this approach to problem solving. Adults from four case studies worked on different problems, from adapting the University of Ottawa campus to international students’ needs, to improving a drinking water problem in Quebec City, to adapting in the face of flooding in Morocco and to decontaminating of groundwater in a New Brunswick village. The researchers studied the affordances (perceived potentialities) of design thinking and collaborative digital tools (Facebook, Realtime Board, Knowledge Forum) during the process of solving of each case study problem. Interviews (individual and group) as well as evidence of participants’ online work were used to identify several affordances of design thinking, namely broader understanding of a problem, awareness, identification of end users’ real needs, caring towards users, production of multiple appropriate solutions and development of problem-solving skills. Different types of ICT have been employed to provide a remote support for participants at the various stages of design thinking: Facebook to share images of environmental problems and proposed solutions, Realtime Board to visualize a problem and to remember its details, and Knowledge Forum to analyze a problem more deeply and facilitate discussion around suggested solutions and prototypes.