Why take a crash course in Design Thinking?
No matter if you work as a project leader, teacher, designer, researcher, administrator or any other profession, Design Thinking will affect how you address your daily work. All these professions have target groups, but it might still be difficult to know how to gain a deeper understanding of your target group. What are their needs and how can we affect their behaviours by meeting the their needs?
Design Thinking is a toolkit of exercises as much as a mind-set that makes you reframe your challenges and create understanding for your target groups. With this understanding as a basis you generate ideas, work visually to concretise and test out if the ideas actually meet the needs of the target group. For Openlab, Design Thinking is key to create relevant solutions addressing societal issues for the growing city.
Course description:
The crash course is divided into two morning sessions, 30:th of November and the 2:nd of December. During these sessions, you will be introduced to the Design Thinking approach and to specific exercises within the method that you will be able to use in your work after the course.
Design Thinking coaches from Openlab will be leading the course: Erika Tanos and Geert van den Boogaard. Both have great experience with working and leading Design Thinking processes. The course will be held in English.
This course was created to reach professionals from all sectors. You will work with interdisciplinary teams, combining public sector, universities and professionals from all backgrounds in order to create opportunities for cross-pollination. Together you will get a proper introduction to the method and you will also get to work through the five phases within Design Thinking - three times over! We will work tangible and simple challenges, with focus on the method and the understanding of how to use it. Building from this understanding, we will discuss and compare together how all different participants can use the method or parts of it in their specific profession.
Learning goals:
– Understand the Design Thinking mind-set. Ability to apply the mind-set when working with simple challenges, as well as understanding how to use parts of it in your own profession.
– Understand and use the five phases of Design Thinking and specific exercises.
Workload:
– Class hours: Four-hour sessions from 8.00 – 12.00 on a Wednesday and Friday. Total class time: 8 hours.
– Field work: Small task to reflect on your own between class-sessions.
Certificate:
After completing all the course elements, you will receive a certificate signed by the course leaders.
More info on Design Thinking:
Design Thinking is an iterating process, meaning you go back and forth within the process and re-do different phases many times. The method is usually described as having five phases: empathize, define, ideate, prototype och test. But you build your own combination of these phases depending on what you need in the process.
Often, the process start with a challenge. You circle in a user group to connected to the challenge, use design ethnography to create understanding and insights about the users needs and behaviours, to move on and re-phrase a new actionable problem statement. You generate ideas that meets the users needs, sketch out scenarios, prototype to make the ideas tangible and test them on users to get real feedback if they actually meet the needs. At any point in the process, you can go back and re-do steps. For example, you might have tested an idea by asking the users about it and got feedback that made you realize you need to go back to the empathy-phase and do interviews again.
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