Design Thinking

Career Focus

The Design Thinking methodology is applied in business to enhance innovation and solve complex problems. This course was designed to equip students with the skills and knowledge to identification, in-depth analyse, interpret and develop concepts within the business administration field, in correlation with information technology trends and real consumer needs. 

As technology advances at high speed, talent mobility and upskilling becomes the main focus of organisations. Organisational cultures will need leaders, managers and human resources experts with strong creative and technical skills. This course is intended for students who are looking to lead sustainable business transformation by gaining confidence in their creative thinking, their research skills, their ability to empathize and bring faster to market products or services based on high-quality customer insights. 

Interventions by international industry experts and design thinking practitioners, will help students understand business disruption and enable them to respond to change with a non-linear mindset. 

Educational Objectives

The role of designers has transformed in time, from producing artefacts to delivering strategic approaches to problem solving for businesses. Nowadays, companies are looking to insert creativity to generate better designed products and services but also to respond to the demands of the workplace of the future. This Design Thinking course gives students the practical tools and helps them address the constant pressure delivery managers face, to be innovative in organisations. 

The course introduces students to the methodology, concepts and processes critical to run successful design thinking sessions. Knowing the small successful rate of bringing new ideas to life, this course provides methodologies to break through these challenges. During the lectures you will learn what ‘design thinking’ is, how it differs from traditional problem solving approach and business strategy, and how it can be used to improve existing products or services, or introduce breakthrough ideas. By the end of this course, you will have a set of tools to inform product design and development for your own start-up, business or in the company where you are working.

Course Content

The course materials are intentionally designed to support students in their learning process, by mixing both theoretical and practical approaches. The classes are dynamic, centred on peer-to-peer interaction and creative collaboration. Teams are assigned challenges and taught how to approach these provocations with a designer mindset: empathise, define, ideate, prototype, test. A special attention is given to the use of the research tools: observation and interviewing, and developing empathy to better understand the needs of the customers. Also, learning how to apply the design thinking process and ideation to build a creative collaborative culture in organisations is a key aspect students will practice during the sessions. 

Skills:

• Empathize to understand real consumer needs
• Ask the right questions to define and re-define innovation challenges
• Practice creative collaboration
• Visualize to form images of your goal
• Develop rapid prototypes to bring ideas into reality as quickly as possible, and obtain feedback

Knowledge:

• Know-how to use the tools: journey mapping, design brief, design criteria, brainstorming and ideation, concept development, and apply the methodology of design thinking
• Approach challenges with a prototyping mindset, where iterations, trial and error, and even failure are all part of a valuable, creative learning process