Design Thinking for everyone.

Context

Here is presented one of the educational Design Thinking courses I have planned and delivered alone and with my colleagues. This part blends theory of Design thinking and best practices to empower others to use design. I believe the natural way of learing about design thinking is to experience it in practice. This is why I prefer to show it, and let all the participants get their hands dirty and experience the process though examples, fingers in paper glue.

Here you can see pictures from an NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) Design Thinking course for non-designer postgraduate students, where Inventas delivered two learning by doing sessions.

Project goal and process

The two days’ workshop provided an intro to the whole Design Thinking process with guiding examples and practical hands on exercises, as it is practiced also at Inventas, design and engineering agency. The course ensemble, created by NTNU, was tailored for people who were not familiar with Design Thinking or knew very little about it.  

The goal was to give everyone a holistic understanding of Design Thinking, how to use it despite the professional background and show benefits to implement it to the personal work strategies. In practice, the two workshops took place two weeks apart from each other, giving the participants a change to execute their user research homework. The second workshop built on the top of these user centric findings.

Key takeaways

The delivered two days course gathered a record amount of course participants. Everybody was engaged to the given tasks and we maintained a positive and open-minded atmosphere throughout our part of the course. We managed to spark joy and show process and benefits of design thinking for these inspiring future talents.

In general, I think workshops should be more active and fun, play some music to remove the fear of a silent place, make everybody feel welcome and let it swing. I am happy to contribute from my part to design education and to spread the word about design and design mindsets, specially to those new to design.

As of writing this, my latest Design Thinking workshop was held online just few days ago and I am really happy and proud of all the participants who didn’t let COVID-19 to stop them from learning and keeping up the good spirit. Looking forward to the next workshop.