Discovery Phase

Orientation, generating insights and identifying needs

DISCOVERY - unsurprisingly - is all about finding things out. This stage is involves listening and looking in different ways at what goes on in school. The aim is to really understand what students and staff are trying to achieve and what's helping or preventing them from doing so.

It's important to involve as many people as possible. Our job is to help people in school to explore how they feel about the school for themselves, to collect what we've found out and to present it back to those we met - along with some sketchy ideas about how things might be improved. It's also very important to keep an open mind. We need to be curious even if we think we know what people will think or say. The best tip for DISCOVERY is to keep asking 'why?'.

DISCOVERY can include all kinds of activites including mapping relationships to show how people work together to make a school work. We might also interview people, map or list the 'touchpoints' that exist in the school, and chart the journeys that people take through a school day.

We may spend a day in the life of someone in the school that we don't normally spend time with - like the caretaker or a new pupil. You can learn a great deal from spending time in somebody else's shoes. We may keep a diary of the ups and downs of the school week - once we've done this for a while we can look back and ask ourselves why we felt the way we did.

The outcome from this stage should be a short list of design challenges or opportunities that we want to tackle - and a willingness to try and solve them together.

Things that we'll have at the end of this phase:

A variety of pictures and stories showing different people's experiences of being at school

Maps, diagrams or illustrations that show aspects of how the school operates. For example, how does lunchtime work? What is the library used for?

An understanding about how decisions are made and some of the factors have to be taken into account

Insights on what's working and what's not

An understanding of some of the future plans for the school

A plan of action for the next stage



Posted by engine on 02/01