Introduction to Design Thinking

Innovation is the cornerstone of highly successful companies, especially those that continue to be successful over the years and decades. Design thinking practices fuel this continual innovation, as they are the critical links from inspiration to delivery, concept to showroom floor, and start-up to global business.

Design thinking is a structured approach to promoting innovation and creative problem-solving. It is not a new approach. It has been around for centuries, as the art, architecture, and inventions of mankind illustrate.  By examining the steps to achieving great design and maximum utility of product, design thinking approaches provide a framework in which to develop new solutions to problems and new products to sell.

This highly interactive course is designed to help participants think like designers to generate innovation, and to help teams to produce more innovation and creativity.  Since design thinking is based on doing rather than thinking, participants are challenged to apply the techniques, in the classroom, to create new ideas and solutions to a case study project.

Who should attend:

Anyone who is interested in improving personal skills for enabling innovation.

What you will learn:

At the end of this program, you will be able to:

• Explain the underlying principles and value of using design thinking for innovation
• Describe the basic concepts of a leading design thinking methodology
• Apply tools like scenario mapping and storytelling to prototype solutions
• Apply critical thinking to problems and solutions
• Drive innovation through design thinking

Course Overview:

Getting Started

Foundation Concepts

• Activity: the challenges to innovation and growth
• Identifying problems and solutions 
• What is different about design thinking?
• Activity: Design thinking in the workplace
• Design thinking skills
• Activity: Design thinking skills
• Design thinking mindset
• Principles of Design Thinking
• Activity: design thinking principles
• The design thinking frameworks

Stages of Design Thinking

• Introduction to the Stanford Model
• Empathize Stage – Summary of related tools, techniques, and skills
• Activity: Apply empathy to product development and solving problems 
• Define Stage – Summary of related tools, techniques, and skills
• Activity:  Incorporate  flexible approaches to define and solve problems
• Ideate Stage – Summary of related tools, techniques, and skills
• Activity: Apply ideation concepts create new products and solutions
• Prototype Stage – Summary of related tools, techniques, and skills
• Activity: create prototypes for new products and process solutions
• Test Stage – Summary of related tools, techniques, and skills
• Activity: Define tests that identify the best solutions and approaches

Design thinking Practices

• Activity: The design thinking team
• Visualization practices:  turn ideas and solutions into pictures and graphics
• Activity: visualize a solution
• Improvisation practices: expand your thinking capacity and break out of the boxes
• Activity: improvising a solution
• General design thinking practices

Empathy Practices

• Improve engagement
• Activity: ask the right questions
• Observe the current situation
• Activity: set up an observation

Define Practices

• Unpacking
• Activity: Unpack to the Wall
• Define the customers
• Activity: Create personas

Ideation Practices

• Activity: organize the Wall
• Pattern recognition
• Activity: connect the dots and identify patterns

Prototyping Practices

• Type of design thinking prototypes
• Activity: create a Franken prototype
• Activity: evaluate the prototype

Testing Practices

• Forms of design thinking testing
• Activity: Define test to eliminate potential solutions
• Activity: perform an A/B test on a design thinking prototype

Adopt and Adapt Design Thinking

• Cautions and Pitfalls
• Assumptions
• Exercise: assumptions
• Cognitive biases and Groupthink
• Exercise: Overcome cognitive biases and groupthink
• Design Thinking Patterns and anti-patterns
• Use patterns to promote design thinking
• Avoid anti-patterns that inhibit design thinking
• Exercise: resolving and avoiding design thinking anti-patterns

Summary and Next Steps

• Get the best results out of design thinking
• Activity: How will you know?
• Exercise: Best practice
• Review of expectations
• Exercise: Personal Action Plans