Innov201

Course Description

In this class, student teams will tackle important design challenges, which they themselves will identify by using the design thinking methodology. Below are the main building blocks of design thinking, which we will learn through a highly active, collaborative, hands-on learning environment:

Empathy

As design thinkers, we begin by focusing on the human experience. We understand that the most impactful innovations are those that address important human needs in meaningful ways. To understand these needs, we adopt a deeply empathic perspective by standing in the shoes of others, and experiencing life from their perspective. This is not new, however. Anthropologists have been doing this for generations. Design thinking simply relays this powerful approach to address the challenges of modern-day organizations.

Fail early to succeed sooner

Design thinkers embrace iterations by building rough and rapid prototypes, and testing them early on. At first this can feel chaotic and risky. Design thinkers quickly adopt trial and error, and value the immediate feedback that it provides. We're open to small, early failures, which eventually pave the way to success. We don't, however, think that failure is fun. That would be disingenuous. All we do is train ourselves—and our teams—to embrace failure for the learning opportunity that it really is.

Block Busting

Design thinkers understand that with the right approach, our minds can become boundless. Quite often, however, the flow of creative ideas becomes obstructed by social constructs, self-imposed limitations, and personal biases, which we inevitably adopt as we grow older. Design thinkers learn to break these mental blocks by deferring judgement, letting go of unhelpful preconceptions, building on the ideas of others, and bringing deep awareness to everything that we do.

Q's Over A's

Design thinkers focus more on asking the right questions than coming up with the right answers. This is because the goal of design is not to discover an existing truth through traditional analytical thinking. That's the role of science. Instead, design thinkers seek to invent the future through synthesis. And because there is no single 'right future,' but instead many 'possible futures,' asking the right questions helps us explore multiple possibilities—eventually honing in on the most appropriate one.

Co-Concocting

Although some independent thinking can be good for idea generation, design thinkers recognize early on that meaningful, human-centered innovations can only flourish through socialization. Design thinkers constantly seek opportunities for radical collaboration and co-creation. It is through the cross-pollination of various ideas, perspectives, and approaches that the creative process flourishes. We leverage diversity in all its forms—gender, cultural, academic, professional—to break with the status quo.

Serious Playing

Designing and innovating is inherently ambiguous and messy. Design thinkers embrace this non-linearity and chaos through open-mindedness, flexibility, and a youthful sense of experimentation and play. We acknowledge that micromanaging the innovation process is not only futile, but also counterproductive. Design thinkers revel in uncertainty, improvise constantly, trust their gut feeling, and laugh a lot. We don't take ourselves too seriously, but we take what we do very seriously.

Learning Outcomes

After completion of this course in design thinking, the student has/can:

Knowledge

• Broad knowledge about human-centered and design-driven innovation.

• A deep understanding of how empathy drives innovation processes.

• Overarching knowledge about how problems are discovered, ideas are shaped, and prototypes are developed and tested

Skills

• Put herself/himself in the shoes of others and adopt an empathic perspective by observing and immersing

• Interview people to elicit meaningful responses that point her/him towards deep intentions

• Make sense of empathy research by crafting powerful insights, and move from data to knowledge

• Craft a strong Point of View, which will synthesize empathy research and give it focus and direction

• Come up with creative ideas that will serve as solutions to complex, ambiguous challenges

• Use many different ideation tools like brainstorming, bodystorming, brainwriting, and quick sketching

• Build all sorts of rapid and rough prototypes that bring ideas into the real world quickly and cheaply

• Expose prototypes to the world, ask the right questions, receive good feedback, learn, and iterate repeatedly

General Competencies

• Collaborate with people with different backgrounds, and tap into the creative potential of diversity

• Play, have fun, laugh, and not take herself/himself too seriously, while taking her/his creative work extremely seriously

• Concoct innovative solutions to important human challenges in a real-life context

• Learn and innovative under conditions of extreme volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA)