Microsoft's Skills 2000 aims to close the gap.
Nancy Lewis, general manager for Worldwide Training and Certification at Microsoft Corp., believes that vendors need to "pull together" and take the lead in closing the skills gap. For Lewis, "goal number one," is to attract more people to the industry, and "goal number two," is to train those workers. To help move things along, Microsoft recently launched the Skills 2000 program, a multimillion dollar, two-year effort designed to help close the skills gap with outreach, education, and training initiatives.

The company also pumped $75 million into the Microsoft Authorized Academic Training Program (AATP), which trains students at the high school, vocational, community college, and university levels in disciplines such as network management, systems administration, and computer programming. According to Microsoft, more than 100,000 students at 500 schools in 38 states will receive AATP training by the end of the 1998 academic year.

Sign up for Cisco's shop class for the 21st century.
Joining the training effort, Cisco, a leading vendor of network products such as routers and hubs, is sponsoring a nationwide program that will enable high school and college students to earn certification as Cisco Certified Networking Associates. In 1997, Cisco established 57 Networking Academies in high schools and junior colleges in seven states, and the company expects to have more than 400 academies in all 50 states by the fall semester of 1998. Cisco describes the effort as the equivalent of a shop class for the 21st century. Students in the program will learn the skills necessary to design and manage computer networks. Cisco is contributing approximately $18 million in curriculum, equipment, and resources to launch the program.

According to Cisco regional managers Steve Armstrong and Kevin Givens, strong interest in the program has come from the University of the District of Columbia, Howard University, and Archbishop Carroll High School. In Maryland, Baltimore's Washington High School now hosts a Cisco academy, and Givens is working with the schools in Prince George's Co., Montgomery Co., and Baltimore City to establish Networking Academies in those counties.

In addition, Cisco is teaming up with the Virginia Community Colleges System (VCCS) to start regional academies on 23 campuses throughout the state by the fall semester of 1998. These regional academies will support local academies in Virginia high schools. Armstrong and Givens believe there are approximately 30 schools in the District that could potentially host Cisco Networking Academies.

Novell has opened a novel foundation.
Novell Inc., the Orem, Utah-based vendor of networking software, is also sponsoring a program for training workers in network administration. Novell recently sponsored a program at Ballou High School in the District that offered students networking courses and career support. The project, carried out in conjunction with the Foundation for Educational Innovation, proved so successful that Novell donated $100,000 worth of software to help expand the program to surrounding schools.

Novell operates 1,450 training centers around the world, with an additional 420 high schools, community colleges, and universities throughout the United States offering Novell training. According to David Marler, director of business development for Novell Education, schools in Michigan, Florida, and California are now working on plans to deploy Novell's Certified Novell Administrator (CNA) program. According to Novell, approximately 25,000 students nationwide will take the CNA course as part of the high school curriculum during 1998.

B.S. holders are top guns at entry-level.
At the university level, says Dr. Lloyd Griffiths, dean of the School of Information Technology and Engineering at the Northern Virginia campus of George Mason University, "the way colleges are teaching [technology] is changing dramatically." For example, at George Mason, students from all departments, including liberal arts majors, will soon be able to select a minor in IT by taking 17 credit hours of technology course work. This new approach "came at the request of industry," Griffiths notes, partly because of the realization that "there are a lot of [technology-related jobs] that don't need a Ph.D. in computer science."

The most solid path for ensuring a long and successful career in high technology is to complete a four-year bachelor's degree in computer science or engineering. According to Griffiths, students who graduate with four-year technical degrees are snapped up by employers as soon as they graduate. Thanks to the overwhelming demand for high-tech workers, most computer science and engineering college grads can pick and choose from numerous entry-level offers, select a work culture that works for them, and negotiate great benefits.

Many companies, such as CDSI, begin wooing students with paid internships that bring them into the company even before they graduate. "We focus on the computer science and business departments," at the University of Maryland for entry-level workers, says Hollister. "We try to get interns from both of those groups" because CDSI has divisions that focus on IT solutions and business application solutions, he says. Even so, it's tough hanging onto the grads once their internships are over and graduation approaches. "The offers these interns are getting are outstanding," says Hollister, recalling one student who had seven job offers prior to graduation.

In addition, regional technology groups, such as the High Technology Council (HTC) of Maryland and Virginia's Northern Virginia Technology Council are leaning on local legislatures to do more to promote high-tech education and training in the schools. HTC, for example, is cosponsoring a tuition release bill in Maryland that would provide free tuition for technology courses at community colleges and universities in exchange for a commitment from the student to work in a Maryland company after graduation.

This article mentions various methods to fix your disabled administrator account on Windows 11/10. To access most of the features, you need administrator privilege on your PC. And, if you are not able to access the administrator account for some reason, it can prevent you from doing a lot of things on your computer. If you are facing a disabled administrator account problem, look no further. Here, I will be discussing some solutions to resolve this issue.

Here are the methods that you can try if you are unable to access the administrator account on Windows 11/10:

1. Restart Windows in Safe Mode
2. Activate Administrator account through Command Prompt
3. Use Registry Editor
4. Fix it through Group Policy Editor
5. Create a new Administrator Account
6. Use PowerShell to Enable Hidden Administrator Account

Let’s discuss these solutions in detail!

1] Restart Windows in Safe Mode

Check if you can log on to Windows as an administrator in Safe Mode even when your administrator account is disabled. To boot Windows in Safe mode:

• Open the Settings app by pressing Windows + I shortcut key and then go to Updates & Security > Recovery tab.
• Go to the Advanced Setup section and click on the Restart now button.
• As Windows attempts to restart your system, you will see some options on the screen including Troubleshoot; click on it.
• Then, click on Advanced options > Startup Settings and you will see an option called Enable Safe Mode.
• Press the key assigned for Enable Safe Mode option and then Windows will start in safe mode.

Once there, see if you can log in. One in, do the following:

• Open Computer Management
• Expand Local Users and Groups
• Click Users, right-click Administrator in the right pane
• Click Properties.
• Click to clear the Account is disabled check box, and then click OK.

2] Activate Administrator account through Command Prompt

Try activating the administrator account using the command prompt and see if it is able to fix the problem. You can follow the below steps for that:

• First, press and hold the Shift key and then tap on the Restart option on your login screen. This will take you to Advanced Boot Options.
• Now, click on the Troubleshoot > Advanced Options > Command Prompt option
• Choose a user account and enter the password to it.
• When the Command Prompt opens up, execute this command in it: net user administrator /active:yes
• Reboot your PC and check.

The above suggestions will help you if it is your admin account that has disabled.

The following suggestions will require you to be signed in as an administrator. So if it is someone else’s Admin account that has been disabled, you can try to re-enable it using the usual method or try these suggestions.

3] Use Registry Editor

Open Command Prompt using steps mentioned in method (2). Now, type regedit in CMD and press Enter button. Doing so will open up Registry Editor.

In Registry Editor, select HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE present in the left panel and then click File > Load Hive option.

Next, browse the following location on your PC: C:\Windows\System32\config.

Here, you will see a file named SAM; click and open it.

Now, you need to go to the following path in Registry Editor:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SAM\Domains\Account\Users

In this location, you will see a 000001F4 key which you need to select.  And then, double-click on the F binary value present on the right side.

Now, check for 0038 entry and see the first column showing 11. Replace this value with 11/10.

Finally, press the OK button and then close both Registry Editor and CMD to reboot your PC.

This should fix the disabled administrator account issue on Windows 11/10.

Related: How to Enable or Disable built-in Administrator account in Windows 11/10.

4] Fix it through Group Policy Editor

Group Policy Editor allows you to configure several policies and can be used to control user accounts. You can use it to fix disabled administrator account on Windows 10 PC by following below steps:

Open Run app using Windows Key + R hotkey. Type gpedit.msc and then click on OK to open Group Policy Editor.

In the Group Policy Editor, go to the following option:

Computer Configuration > Windows Settings > Security Settings > Local Policies > Security Options

You will now see an Accounts: Administrator account status option in the right panel. Double click this option and a Properties window will open up.

Make sure the Enabled option is selected. If not, click on it and then press Apply > OK button.

5] Create a new Administrator Account

Try creating a new admin account on your PC if you still get a disabled administrator account problem. You can create a user account and then convert it to an Administrator account. Use the Settings app to create a new administrator account by following the below instructions:

• Open the Settings app and go to Accounts > Family & other users option.
• Now, select Add someone else to this PC option from the right panel.
• On the next prompt, select I don’t have this person’s sign-in information option.
• Next, select Add a user without a Microsoft account, then enter the preferred name and password for your account, and then press the Next button.
• You will now see the newly added account on the Accounts page. To make it an Administrator account, click on it and then select the Account Type option under it.
• Set the Account Type to Administrator and press the OK button.

This will create an administrator account that you can start using.

6] Use PowerShell to Enable Hidden Administrator Account

Another trick to fix the disabled administrator account issue is to try enabling the hidden administrator account using Powershell.

Press Windows + X key to open up the shortcut menu and select Windows Powershell (Admin) option from it.

Alternately, go to the search box and type PowerShell and then open the Powershell app using the Run as administrator option.

Next, type and execute this command in Powershell:

Enable-LocalUser -Name "Administrator"

Doing so should enable you to access your administrator account on Windows 11/10.

Hopefully, this guide was helpful in case you were unable to access your administrator account on Windows 11/10.

Now read: Your IT administrator has disabled Windows Security

In a Windows operating system, an Administrator account is an account that allows a user to make changes that require administrative permissions. An Administrator has more rights on a Windows OS as compared to the users with a local account. For example, the users with a local or standard account can access files and folders on their own user space, make system changes that do not require administrative permissions, install and uninstall programs, etc. On the other hand, an Administrator can change security settings, install and uninstall software, add and remove users, make changes to other user accounts, etc. In short, to perform the tasks that require administrative permissions, you should be logged in as an Administrator. In this tutorial, we will see how to log in as an Administrator in Windows 11/10.

Every Windows computer has a Local Administrator account that is created at the time of Windows installation. As described above, the Administrator has full access to the Windows device as compared to other standard users. The Administrator can also create new and delete the existing users and change the user account permissions. You can log in as an Administrator in Windows 11/10 by:

1. Using the existing Administrator Account
2. Enabling the built-in Administrator account
3. Creating a new Local Administrator account
4. Changing the local or standard into an Administrator account

Let’s see all these methods in detail.

1] Using the existing Administrator Account

If you are starting your PC then locate the Administrator account and use the password to login.

If you are currently not logged in as an administrator and want to change to an admin, open Start, click on the user icon, select Sign out and then log into the Admin account by using its password.

2] Enabling the built-in Administrator account

The Windows OS has a built-in Administrator account. In Windows 11/10 and Windows Server 2016, the built-in Administrator account is disabled at the time of Windows installation and another local account is created which is the member of the Administrators group.

The built-in Administrator account is also called the Super Administrator account. If we compare the built-in Administrator account with the Local Administrator account, the built-in Administrator account has elevated privileges. This means when you perform the administrative tasks, you will not get the UAC prompt. Apart from that, if you want to do some serious troubleshooting on your Windows machine or if you want to recover your main account or another user account, you can use the built-in Administrator account.

Because the built-in Administrator account does not show the UAC prompt, any application can have full control over your system. Therefore, running this account on a regular basis can be risky. You should enable the built-in Administrator account only if you have to do some troubleshooting or recover other user accounts. After performing your task, you should disable it.

As explained above, every Windows OS has a Local Administrator account which is created at the time of Windows installation. Hence, you have to sign in to that Local Administrator account in order to enable the built-in Administrator account. After enabling the built-in Administrator account, you can login as an Administrator in Windows 11/10.

3] Creating a new Local Administrator account

Every Windows 11/10 computer has a default Local Administrator account which is created at the time of Windows installation. Using that account, you can create another Local Administrator account for another user. To do so, open the Accounts page in your Windows 11/10 Settings and then click on the Family & other users option. Now, you have two options:

• You can create a Local Administrator account for your family member.
• You can create a Local Administrator account for a person who is not your family member.

Let’s see how to create a Local Administrator account for a family member and other users.

 Create a Local Administrator account for your family member

You can use this option if you have another Microsoft account and you want to add that account as an Administrator to your Windows computer.

1. On the Family & other users page in Windows 11/10 Settings, click on the Add account button next to the Add a family member option.
2. Enter the email address of the family member and click Next.
3. Select the role (organizer or member) and click Invite. After that, an invite will be sent to the email address.
4. Open the email address and accept the invitation. After accepting the invitation, that account will be added automatically to your Windows device.
5. Now, open the Family & other users page in WIndows 11/10 Accounts settings and select the newly added account.
6. Click Change account type and select Administrator in the drop-down and click OK.

Now, you can login as an Administrator in Windows 11/10 using that account.

Create a Local Administrator account for a person who is not your family member

If you do not have another Microsoft account, you can still create a Local Administrator account. This time, you have to add an account in the Other users section on the Family & other users page. The steps are as follows:

1. Open the Family & other users page in Windows 11/10 Accounts settings.
2. Click on the Add account button next to Add other user.
3. You will be prompted to enter your email address. Click on the I don’t have this person’s sign-in information link.
4. Now, click Add a user without a Microsoft account.
5. Enter your username and password. After that, select the security questions and type your answers.
6. Click Next.
7. Now, select the newly created account and click Change account type.
8. Select Administrator in the drop-down and click OK.

Now, you can use this account to login as an Administrator in Windows 11/10.

Read: How to rename built-in Administrator Account in Windows.

4] Changing the local or standard account into an Administrator account

If you already have created a local account on your Windows machine, you can change its type and use that account to login as an Administrator. The steps to change the local account to an Administrator account are as follows:

1. Open the Family & other users page in Windows 11/10 Accounts settings.
2. Select the local user account under the Other users section.
3. Click on the Change account type button and select Administrator in the drop-down.
4. Now, click OK.

How do I log onto my computer as an Administrator?

At the time of Windows installation, a Local Administrator account is created automatically. You can use that account to log onto your computer as an Administrator. Apart from that, you can also enable the hidden or built-in Administrator account or create an additional Local Administrator account.

We have explained all these methods above in this article.

How do I run Windows as an Administrator?

To run Windows as an Administrator, you should have an Administrator account. There are different methods by which you can create an Administrator account. In addition to this, you can also enable the built-in Administrator account. But it is not recommended to use the built-in Administrator account on a regular basis due to security issues.

This is all about how to log in as an Administrator in Windows 11/10.

Read next: How to fix the disabled Administrator account on Windows 11/10.

In an area outside Hyderabad, India, between the suburbs and the countryside, a young woman—we’ll call her Shanti—fetches water daily from the always-open local borehole that is about 300 feet from her home. She uses a 3-gallon plastic container that she can easily carry on her head. Shanti and her husband rely on the free water for their drinking and washing, and though they’ve heard that it’s not as safe as water from the Naandi Foundation-run community treatment plant, they still use it. Shanti’s family has been drinking the local water for generations, and although it periodically makes her and her family sick, she has no plans to stop using it.

Shanti has many reasons not to use the water from the Naandi treatment center, but they’re not the reasons one might think. The center is within easy walking distance of her home—roughly a third of a mile. It is also well known and affordable (roughly 10 rupees, or 20 cents, for 5 gallons). Being able to pay the small fee has even become a status symbol for some villagers. Habit isn’t a factor, either. Shanti is forgoing the safer water because of a series of flaws in the overall design of the system.

Although Shanti can walk to the facility, she can’t carry the 5-gallon jerrican that the facility requires her to use. When filled with water, the plastic rectangular container is simply too heavy. The container isn’t designed to be held on the hip or the head, where she likes to carry heavy objects. Shanti’s husband can’t help carry it, either. He works in the city and doesn’t return home until after the water treatment center is closed. The treatment center also requires them to buy a monthly punch card for 5 gallons a day, far more than they need. “Why would I buy more than I need and waste money?” asks Shanti, adding she’d be more likely to purchase the Naandi water if the center allowed her to buy less.

The community treatment center was designed to produce clean and potable water, and it succeeded very well at doing just that. In fact, it works well for many people living in the community, particularly families with husbands or older sons who own bikes and can visit the treatment plant during working hours. The designers of the center, however, missed the opportunity to design an even better system because they failed to consider the culture and needs of all of the people living in the community.

This missed opportunity, although an obvious omission in hindsight, is all too common. Time and again, initiatives falter because they are not based on the client’s or customer’s needs and have never been prototyped to solicit feedback. Even when people do go into the field, they may enter with preconceived notions of what the needs and solutions are. This flawed approach remains the norm in both the business and social sectors.

As Shanti’s situation shows, social challenges require systemic solutions that are grounded in the client’s or customer’s needs. This is where many approaches founder, but it is where design thinking—a new approach to creating solutions—excels.

Traditionally, designers focused their attention on improving the look and functionality of products. Classic examples of this type of design work are Apple Computer’s iPod and Herman Miller’s Aeron chair. In accurate years designers have broadened their approach, creating entire systems to deliver products and services.

Design thinking incorporates constituent or consumer insights in depth and rapid prototyping, all aimed at getting beyond the assumptions that block effective solutions. Design thinking—inherently optimistic, constructive, and experiential—addresses the needs of the people who will consume a product or service and the infrastructure that enables it.

Businesses are embracing design thinking because it helps them be more innovative, better differentiate their brands, and bring their products and services to market faster. Nonprofits are beginning to use design thinking as well to develop better solutions to social problems. Design thinking crosses the traditional boundaries between public, for-profit, and nonprofit sectors. By working closely with the clients and consumers, design thinking allows high-impact solutions to bubble up from below rather than being imposed from the top.

Design Thinking at Work

Jerry Sternin, founder of the Positive Deviance Initiative and an associate professor at Tufts University until he died last year, was skilled at identifying what and critical of what he called outsider solutions to local problems. Sternin’s preferred approach to social innovation is an example of design thinking in action.¹ In 1990, Sternin and his wife, Monique, were invited by the government of Vietnam to develop a model to decrease in a sustainable manner high levels of malnutrition among children in 10,000 villages. At the time, 65 percent of Vietnamese children under age 5 suffered from malnutrition, and most solutions relied on government and UN agencies donations of nutritional supplements. But the supplements—the outsider solution—never delivered the hoped-for results.² As an alternative, the Sternins used an approach called positive deviance, which looks for existing solutions (hence sustainable) among individuals and families in the community who are already doing well.³

The Sternins and colleagues from Save the Children surveyed four local Quong Xuong communities in the province of Than Hoa and asked for examples of “very, very poor” families whose children were healthy. They then observed the food preparation, cooking, and serving behaviors of these six families, called “positive deviants,” and found a few consistent yet rare behaviors. Parents of well-nourished children collected tiny shrimps, crabs, and snails from rice paddies and added them to the food, along with the greens from sweet potatoes. Although these foods were readily available, they were typically not eaten because they were considered unsafe for children. The positive deviants also fed their children multiple smaller meals, which allowed small stomachs to hold and digest more food each day.

The Sternins and the rest of their group worked with the positive deviants to offer cooking classes to the families of children suffering from malnutrition. By the end of the program’s first year, 80 percent of the 1,000 children enrolled in the program were adequately nourished. In addition, the effort had been replicated within 14 villages across Vietnam.⁴

The Sternins’ work is a good example of how positive deviance and design thinking relies on local expertise to uncover local solutions. Design thinkers look for work-arounds and improvise solutions—like the shrimps, crabs, and snails—and they find ways to incorporate those into the offerings they create. They consider what we call the edges, the places where “extreme” people live differently, think differently, and consume differently. As Monique Sternin, now director of the Positive Deviance Initiative, explains: “Both positive deviance and design thinking are human-centered approaches. Their solutions are relevant to a unique cultural context and will not necessarily work outside that specific situation.”

One program that might have benefited from design thinking is mosquito net distribution in Africa. The nets are well designed and when used are effective at reducing the incidence of malaria.⁵ The World Health Organization praised the nets, crediting them with significant drops in malaria deaths in children under age 5: a 51 percent decline in Ethiopia, 34 percent decline in Ghana, and 66 percent decline in Rwanda.⁶ The way that the mosquito nets have been distributed, however, has had unintended consequences. In northern Ghana, for instance, nets are provided free to pregnant women and mothers with children under age 5. These women can readily pick up free nets from local public hospitals. For everyone else, however, the nets are difficult to obtain. When we asked a well-educated Ghanaian named Albert, who had recently contracted malaria, whether he slept under a mosquito net, he told us no—there was no place in the city of Tamale to purchase one. Because so many people can obtain free nets, it is not profitable for shop owners to sell them. But hospitals are not equipped to sell additional nets, either.

As Albert’s experience shows, it’s critical that the people designing a program consider not only form and function, but distribution channels as well. One could say that the free nets were never intended for people like Albert—that he was simply out of the scope of the project. But that would be missing a huge opportunity. Without considering the whole system, the nets cannot be widely distributed, which makes the eradication of malaria impossible.

The Origin of Design Thinking

IDEO was formed in 1991 as a merger between David Kelley Design, which created Apple Computer’s first mouse in 1982, and ID Two, which designed the first laptop computer, also in 1982. Initially, IDEO focused on traditional design work for business, designing products like the Palm V personal digital assistant, Oral-B toothbrushes, and Steelcase chairs. These are the types of objects that are displayed in lifestyle magazines or on pedestals in modern art museums.

By 2001, IDEO was increasingly being asked to tackle problems that seemed far afield from traditional design. A healthcare foundation asked us to help restructure its organization, a century-old manufacturing company wanted to better understand its clients, and a university hoped to create alternative learning environments to traditional classrooms. This type of work took IDEO from designing consumer products to designing consumer experiences.

To distinguish this new type of design work, we began referring to it as “design with a small d.” But this phrase never seemed fully satisfactory. David Kelley, also the founder of Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (aka the “d.school”), remarked that every time someone asked him about design, he found himself inserting the word “thinking” to explain what it was that designers do. Eventually, the term design thinking stuck.⁷

As an approach, design thinking taps into capacities we all have but that are overlooked by more conventional problem-solving practices. Not only does it focus on creating products and services that are human centered, but the process itself is also deeply human. Design thinking relies on our ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, to construct ideas that have emotional meaning as well as being functional, and to express ourselves in media other than words or symbols. Nobody wants to run an organization on feeling, intuition, and inspiration, but an over-reliance on the rational and the analytical can be just as risky. Design thinking, the integrated approach at the core of the design process, provides a third way.

The design thinking process is best thought of as a system of overlapping spaces rather than a sequence of orderly steps. There are three spaces to keep in mind: inspiration, ideation, and implementation. Think of inspiration as the problem or opportunity that motivates the search for solutions; ideation as the process of generating, developing, and testing ideas; and implementation as the path that leads from the project stage into people’s lives.

The reason to call these spaces, rather than steps, is that they are not always undertaken sequentially. Projects may loop back through inspiration, ideation, and implementation more than once as the team refines its ideas and explores new directions. Not surprisingly, design thinking can feel chaotic to those doing it for the first time. But over the life of a project, participants come to see that the process makes sense and achieves results, even though its form differs from the linear, milestone-based processes that organizations typically undertake.

Inspiration

Although it is true that designers do not always proceed through each of the three spaces in linear fashion, it is generally the case that the design process begins with the inspiration space—the problem or opportunity that motivates people to search for solutions. And the classic starting point for the inspiration phase is the brief. The brief is a set of mental constraints that gives the project team a framework from which to begin, benchmarks by which they can measure progress, and a set of objectives to be realized—such as price point, available technology, and market segment.

But just as a hypothesis is not the same as an algorithm, the brief is not a set of instructions or an attempt to answer the question before it has been posed. Rather, a well-constructed brief allows for serendipity, unpredictability, and the capricious whims of fate—the creative realm from which breakthrough ideas emerge. Too abstract and the brief risks leaving the project team wandering; too narrow a set of constraints almost guarantees that the outcome will be incremental and, likely, mediocre.

Once the brief has been constructed, it is time for the design team to discover what people’s needs are. Traditional ways of doing this, such as focus groups and surveys, rarely yield important insights. In most cases, these techniques simply ask people what they want. Conventional research can be useful in pointing toward incremental improvements, but those don’t usually lead to the type of breakthroughs that leave us scratching our heads and wondering why nobody ever thought of that before.

Henry Ford understood this when he said, “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said ‘a faster horse.’” ⁸ Although people often can’t tell us what their needs are, their actual behaviors can provide us with invaluable clues about their range of unmet needs.

A better starting point is for designers to go out into the world and observe the actual experiences of smallholder farmers, schoolchildren, and community health workers as they improvise their way through their daily lives. Working with local partners who serve as interpreters and cultural guides is also important, as well as having partners make introductions to communities, helping build credibility quickly and ensuring understanding. Through “homestays” and shadowing locals at their jobs and in their homes, design thinkers become embedded in the lives of the people they are designing for.

Earlier this year, Kara Pecknold, a student at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, British Columbia, took an internship with a women’s cooperative in Rwanda. Her task was to develop a Web site to connect rural Rwandan weavers with the world. Pecknold soon discovered that the weavers had little or no access to computers and the Internet. Rather than ask them to maintain a Web site, she reframed the brief, broadening it to ask what services could be provided to the community to help them Boost their livelihoods. Pecknold used various design thinking techniques, drawing partly from her training and partly from ideo’s Human Centered Design toolkit, to understand the women’s aspirations.

Because Pecknold didn’t speak the women’s language, she asked them to document their lives and aspirations with a camera and draw pictures that expressed what success looked like in their community. Through these activities, the women were able to see for themselves what was important and valuable, rather than having an outsider make those assumptions for them. During the project, Pecknold also provided each participant with the equivalent of a day’s wages (500 francs, or roughly $1) to see what each person did with the money. Doing this gave her further insight into the people’s lives and aspirations. Meanwhile, the women found that a mere 500 francs a day could be a significant, life-changing sum. This visualization process helped both Pecknold and the women prioritize their planning for the community.⁹

Ideation

The second space of the design thinking process is ideation. After spending time in the field observing and doing design research, a team goes through a process of synthesis in which they distill what they saw and heard into insights that can lead to solutions or opportunities for change. This approach helps multiply options to create choices and different insights about human behavior. These might be alternative visions of new product offerings, or choices among various ways of creating interactive experiences. By testing competing ideas against one another, the likelihood that the outcome will be bolder and more compelling increases.

As Linus Pauling, scientist and two-time Nobel Prize winner, put it, “To have a good idea you must first have lots of ideas.” ¹⁰ Truly innovative ideas challenge the status quo and stand out from the crowd—they’re creatively disruptive. They provide a wholly new solution to a problem many people didn’t know they had.

Of course, more choices mean more complexity, which can make life difficult, especially for those whose job it is to control budgets and monitor timelines. The natural tendency of most organizations is to restrict choices in favor of the obvious and the incremental. Although this tendency may be more efficient in the short run, it tends to make an organization conservative and inflexible in the long run. Divergent thinking is the route, not the obstacle, to innovation.

To achieve divergent thinking, it is important to have a diverse group of people involved in the process. Multidisciplinary people—architects who have studied psychology, artists with MBAs, or engineers with marketing experience—often demonstrate this quality. They’re people with the capacity and the disposition for collaboration across disciplines.

To operate within an interdisciplinary environment, an individual needs to have strengths in two dimensions—the “T-shaped” person. On the vertical axis, every member of the team needs to possess a depth of skill that allows him or her to make tangible contributions to the outcome. The top of the “T” is where the design thinker is made. It’s about empathy for people and for disciplines beyond one’s own. It tends to be expressed as openness, curiosity, optimism, a tendency toward learning through doing, and experimentation. (These are the same traits that we seek in our new hires at IDEO.)

Interdisciplinary teams typically move into a structured brainstorming process. Taking one provocative question at a time, the group may generate hundreds of ideas ranging from the absurd to the obvious. Each idea can be written on a Post-it note and shared with the team. Visual representations of concepts are encouraged, as this generally helps others understand complex ideas.

One rule during the brainstorming process is to defer judgment. It is important to discourage anyone taking on the often obstructive, non-generative role of devil’s advocate, as Tom Kelley explains in his book The Ten Faces of Innovation.¹¹ Instead, participants are encouraged to come up with as many ideas as possible. This lets the group move into a process of grouping and sorting ideas. Good ideas naturally rise to the top, whereas the bad ones drop off early on. InnoCentive provides a good example of how design thinking can result in hundreds of ideas. InnoCentive has created a Web site that allows people to post solutions to challenges that are defined by InnoCentive members, a mix of nonprofits and companies. More than 175,000 people—including scientists, engineers, and designers from around the world—have posted solutions.

The Rockefeller Foundation has supported 10 social innovation challenges through InnoCentive and reports an 80 percent success rate in delivering effective solutions to the nonprofits posting challenges. ¹² The open innovation approach is effective in producing lots of new ideas. The responsibility for filtering through the ideas, field-testing them, iterating, and taking them to market ultimately falls to the implementer.

An InnoCentive partnership with the Global Alliance for TB Drug Development sought a theoretical solution to simplify the current TB treatment regimen. “The process is a prime example of design thinking contributing to social innovation,” explained Dwayne Spradlin, InnoCentive’s CEO. “With the TB drug development, the winning solver was a scientist by profession, but submitted to the challenge because his mother—the sole income provider for the family—developed TB when he was 14. She had to stop working, and he took on the responsibility of working and going to school to provide for the family.” Spradlin finds that projects within the InnoCentive community often benefit from such deep and motivating connections.¹³

Implementation

The third space of the design thinking process is implementation, when the best ideas generated during ideation are turned into a concrete, fully conceived action plan. At the core of the implementation process is prototyping, turning ideas into actual products and services that are then tested, iterated, and refined.

Through prototyping, the design thinking process seeks to uncover unforeseen implementation challenges and unintended consequences in order to have more reliable long-term success. Prototyping is particularly important for products and services destined for the developing world, where the lack of infrastructure, retail chains, communication networks, literacy, and other essential pieces of the system often make it difficult to design new products and services.

Prototyping can validate a component of a device, the graphics on a screen, or a detail in the interaction between a blood donor and a Red Cross volunteer. The prototypes at this point may be expensive, complex, and even indistinguishable from the real thing. As the project nears completion and heads toward real-world implementation, prototypes will likely become more complete.

After the prototyping process is finished and the ultimate product or service has been created, the design team helps create a communication strategy. Storytelling, particularly through multimedia, helps communicate the solution to a diverse set of stakeholders inside and outside of the organization, particularly across language and cultural barriers.

VisionSpring, a low-cost eye care provider in India, provides a good example of how prototyping can be a critical step in implementation. VisionSpring, which had been selling studying glasses to adults, wanted to begin providing comprehensive eye care to children. VisionSpring’s design effort included everything other than the design of the glasses, from marketing “eye camps” through self-help groups to training teachers about the importance of eye care and transporting kids to the local eye care center.

Working with VisionSpring, IDEO designers prototyped the eyescreening process with a group of 15 children between the ages of 8 and 12. The designers first tried to screen a young girl’s vision through traditional tests. Immediately, though, she burst into tears—the pressure of the experience was too great and the risk of failure too high. In hopes of diffusing this stressful situation, the designers asked the children’s teacher to screen the next student. Again, the child started to cry. The designers then asked the girl to screen her teacher. She took the task very seriously, while her classmates looked on enviously. Finally, the designers had the children screen each other and talk about the process. They loved playing doctor and both respected and complied with the process.

By prototyping and creating an implementation plan to pilot and scale the project, IDEO was able to design a system for the eye screenings that worked for VisionSpring’s practitioners, teachers, and children. As of September 2009, VisionSpring had conducted in India 10 eye camps for children, screened 3,000 children, transported 202 children to the local eye hospital, and provided glasses for the 69 children who needed them.

“Screening and providing glasses to kids presents many unique problems, so we turned to design thinking to provide us with an appropriate structure to develop the most appropriate marketing and distribution strategy,” explained Peter Eliassen, vice president of sales and operations at VisionSpring. Eliassen added that prototyping let VisionSpring focus on the approaches that put children at ease during the screening process. “Now that we have become a design thinking organization, we continue to use prototypes to assess the feedback and viability of new market approaches from our most important customers: our vision entrepreneurs [or salespeople] and end consumers.” ¹⁴

Systemic Problems Need Systemic Solutions

Many social enterprises already intuitively use some aspects of design thinking, but most stop short of embracing the approach as a way to move beyond today’s conventional problem solving. Certainly, there are impediments to adopting design thinking in an organization. Perhaps the approach isn’t embraced by the entire organization. Or maybe the organization resists taking a human-centered approach and fails to balance the perspectives of users, technology, and organizations.

One of the biggest impediments to adopting design thinking is simply fear of failure. The notion that there is nothing wrong with experimentation or failure, as long as they happen early and act as a source of learning, can be difficult to accept. But a vibrant design thinking culture will encourage prototyping—quick, cheap, and dirty—as part of the creative process and not just as a way of validating finished ideas.

As Yasmina Zaidman, director of knowledge and communications at Acumen Fund, put it, “The businesses we invest in require constant creativity and problem solving, so design thinking is a real success factor for serving the base of the economic pyramid.” Design thinking can lead to hundreds of ideas and, ultimately, real-world solutions that create better outcomes for organizations and the people they serve.

Read more stories by Tim Brown & Jocelyn Wyatt.

A school administrator in Arizona is under fire after an incident involving an elementary school student.

The Laveen Elementary School District confirmed there is an open police investigation.

"We need some change. I demand that you get somebody who cares up in here," said Danielle Jordan, the mother of the child reportedly involved in the incident, during a press conference on Thursday when she told her side of the story.

The incident was caught on surveillance camera, showing a 10-year-old student at Vista Del Sur Accelerated Academy and a now former Laveen Elementary School District administrator.

"As he entered into that office, he got pulled by his clothes, choked with his shirt. Then she slammed him up against the wall," said Jordan.

The district provided a different narrative Thursday, calling it an "improper restraint" when the administrator grabbed the boy's arm and shoulder. In a press release, they said the administrator was asked to come to the school to help with the student and while he was being escorted to the in-school detention room, the administrator thought the student was trying to leave campus. The governing board addressed the incident during their board meeting Thursday evening.

"We acknowledge that the holds used in the video are not appropriate and we do not condone such conduct. Our staff members undergo training for holds and will continue to undergo training," said Jill Barragan, a Laveen Elementary School District governing board member.

They then allowed for public comment, which broke out in some chanting as many parents were wanting to supply their two-minute speaking time to the boy's mother.

"Let her speak," chanted the crowd.

The governing board met with its attorney and ultimately gave her 30 minutes to speak.

"What hurts is that you didn't take the time to call me; you didn't take the time to apologize," said Jordan.

The district said they tried repeatedly to meet with the parent through her attorney and community advocate to seek a resolution. We're told the Phoenix Police Department is still investigating the matter with staff participating in interviews this past week.

"Throughout this process, we have maintained open lines of communication with the family... and we want to emphasize that the employee is no longer with the district," said Barragan.

But, according to the boy's mother, she's just finding that out.

"Just now, formally, just now," said Jordan.

She says that's her motivation for speaking out — and for change.

"I want a policy change. I want case managers in the schools and counselors as opposed to police officers. I want mandates for training," said Jordan.

The student now goes to a different school. We attempted to ask the superintendent questions but he directed us to the communications director who only referred us to the press release. Another board member did speak out.

"I'm not feeling too good about it. But again, I don't know that, you know, we see a video, we don't hear any audio, we don't hear a lot of backstory. We, like I said, as a board member, I'm going to look at the whole picture and do what's best for our kids," said Dr. Torrence Watkins, a Laveen Elementary School District governing board member.

This story was originally published by Ashley Paredez at Scripps News Phoenix.

Trending stories at Scrippsnews.com

The Biden administration unveiled a regulatory proposal late Friday targeting water heaters, the latest in a string of energy efficiency actions cracking down on home appliances.

The Department of Energy (DOE) said its proposal would ultimately "accelerate deployment" of electric heat pump water heaters, save Americans billions of dollars and vastly reduce carbon emissions. If finalized, the proposed standards would force less energy efficient, but cheaper, water heaters off the market.

"Today’s actions — together with our industry partners and stakeholders — Boost outdated efficiency standards for common household appliances, which is essential to slashing utility bills for American families and cutting harmful carbon emissions," Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a statement.

"This proposal reinforces the trajectory of consumer savings that forms the key pillar of Bidenomics and builds on the unprecedented actions already taken by this Administration to lower energy costs for working families across the nation," she continued.

BIDEN ADMIN MOVING FORWARD WITH LIGHT BULB BANS IN COMING WEEKS

Overall, the DOE projected the regulations, which are slated to go into effect in 2029, would save Americans about $198 billion while curbing emissions by 501 million metric tons over the next three decades. That's roughly the same carbon footprint as 63 million homes or half of all homes nationwide.

Under the rule, the federal government would require higher efficiency for heaters using heat pump technology or, in the case of gas-fired water heaters, to achieve efficiency gains through condensing technology. Non-condensing gas-fired water heaters, though, are far cheaper and smaller, meaning they come with lower installation costs.

According to the DOE, water heating accounts for 13% of annual residential energy use and consumer utility costs. 

BIDEN ADMIN'S WAR ON HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCES WILL CAUSE HIGHER PRICES, DIRTIER CLOTHES AND DISHES, EXPERTS WARN

In addition to water heaters, over the last several months, the DOE has unveiled new standards for a wide variety of other appliances including gas stoves, clothes washers, refrigerators and air conditioners. The agency's comment period on a separate dishwasher regulatory proposal concluded Tuesday.

According to the current federal Unified Agenda, a government-wide, semiannual list that highlights regulations agencies plan to propose or finalize within the next 12 months, the Biden administration is additionally moving forward with rules impacting dozens more appliances, including consumer furnaces, pool pumps, battery chargers, ceiling fans and dehumidifiers.

The Biden administration boasted in December that it had taken 110 actions on energy efficiency rules in 2022 alone as part of its climate agenda.

The DOE said Friday that, altogether, its appliance regulations will save Americans $570 billion and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by more than 2.4 billion metric tons over the next 30 years.

However, consumer groups and experts have criticized the administration over its aggressive energy efficiency campaign. They have argued the new regulations will reduce consumer choice and increase costs for Americans.

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"It's just spreading to more and more appliances. It seems that almost everything that plugs in or fires up around the house is either subject to a pending regulation or soon will be," Ben Lieberman, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, previously told Fox News Digital.

"Consumers aren't going to like any of it," he added. "These rules are almost always bad for consumers for the simple reason that they restrict consumer choice." 

A complex problem is one that, at first glance, we don't know how to solve easily.

Computational thinking involves taking that complex problem and breaking it down into a series of small, more manageable problems (decomposition). Each of these smaller problems can then be looked at individually, considering how similar problems have been solved previously (pattern recognition) and focusing only on the important details, while ignoring irrelevant information (abstraction). Next, simple steps or rules to solve each of the smaller problems can be designed (algorithms).

Finally, these simple steps or rules are used to program