Course content

This course is an immersive experience into design thinking—an empathy-based, human-centered, and rapid prototype-driven methodology for innovation. Design thinking helps to tackle challenges such as the creation of new products, technological innovation, services, business models, experiences, processes and/or systems.

The primary aim of the course is to empower students to ideate, launch, run, and successfully complete innovation projects that have a significant and meaningful impact on pioneering organizations and industries.

The course encompasses intensive sessions on need finding, empathy, observation, immersion, ethnographic research, brain-/body-storming, ideation, and rapid prototyping—all in the context of tackling cutting-edge technological challenges and addressing strategic industry objectives.

For further information, see http://www.innovationbydt.org/

Learning outcome

Students of the course will be able to:

• Implement the design-thinking methodology in the context of multiple industries and organizations

• Expose organizational cultures to innovative ways of tackling problems

• Empathize with users and customers through an ethnographic perspective

• Concoct radical ideas to complex, seemingly intractable problems

• Build rapid prototypes that instruct, and inspire valuable conversations among varied stakeholder groups

• Test their prototypes many times and with multiple stakeholders to receive constructive feedback

• Adopt a highly ambiguous, seemingly chaotic, and iterative process that eventually delivers tangible results

Learning methods and activities

We will employ the latest project- and problem-based learning pedagogies, involving real-life challenges, storytelling/storydoing, soft prototyping, and iterative methods.

With regards to the evaluation, we will focus significantly on the design-thinking process, the insights learned, and the skills developed during the educational journey. The quality and applicability of the final prototypes will not be our sole focus.

Students will be evaluated on the following graded deliverables:
• Project Presentation (40%) – team-based
• Design-driven, Knowledge Portfolio (40%) – team-based
• 5-Page Reflective Essay (20%) – individual

Recommended previous knowledge

None.

Required previous knowledge

None.

Course materials

Announced at the beginning of the semester.
Handouts/pdf and

Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All; by Tom Kelley, David Kelley

Rotman on Design: The Best on Design Thinking from Rotman Magazine; by Roger Martin, Karen Christensen

Strategic Management of Technological Innovation; by Melissa A. Schilling