270220 Design Thinking (BS) (SoSe 2014)

Course Objectives
„In the course of your life, you will earn a considerable amount of money (and possibly produce a number of papers and patents). But, if I offer you today to value the 10% of all of it, what price would you value at? Now imagine that today you took a course that increases your value by 10%“ – Warren Buffet.
Design Thinking is an intensive block course for engineers, and other interested Masters students who want to think better and faster. We will focus on two fundamentals:
(1) The workshop method propagated by the design firm “ideo” or in other words:“How to empower a team to ideate better.
(2) From Japan, how solve problems by visualizing them better.

Sessions
There will be a total of 6 days for this course, with one introductory meeting with no pre-work and 5 days of class over two weeks. Thus, it is envisaged to schedule five days of direct student-teacher engagement, with 5 days of seminar in total, lasting five hours each. Of these five teaching sessions, students have a lecture and then practice the content during a workshop.
What is Design Thinking
As a thinking tool, Design Thinking fosters the ability to combine: empathy for the context of a problem, creativity in the generation of insights and solutions, and rationality to fit solutions to the context. Originated at Stanford, and with a school funded by Hasso Plattner (see: http://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/willkommen.html) Design Thinking impacts design processes, engineering practice, and education across disciplines.
Goals
The goal of this course is to acquire Design Thinking skills. Rather than using the traditional MBA case study method, this is a workshop-based course where students learn by doing. In each session, a thinking tool will be introduced and practiced. Nowadays, Design Thinking and its tools are used by product and industrial design firms to ideate products. It is also used to solve so called “wicked problems” – problems for which neither question nor answer is well defined.

Outcomes
By the end of the course, the student is expected to:
(1) Have a sense of self-efficacy & creative confidence
(2) Know how to manage a Design Thinking workshop: Layout, roles, times and process.
(3) Effectively use thinking tools: (a) A3 / PDCA, (b) Root cause analysis, (c) Kaizen / 5S
(4) Apply Design Thinking tools to increase research output.

Requirements for participation, required level

Es sind keine besonderen Vorkenntnisse erforderlich. Das Seminar richtet sich an Studierende im MSc-Studiengang Psychologie und an Studierende anderer Masterstudiengänge. Die Veranstaltung wird in englischer Sprache abgehalten. Anmeldungen erfolgen bitte per Email bei Frau Gisela Weitekemper (gweitekemper@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de)

Bibliography

S. Goldman et al., Design Thinking Research, Understanding Innovation. Student Teams in Search of Design Thinking. DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-01303-9_2, © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014

B. Jobst & C. Meinel, Design Thinking Research, Understanding Innovation. How Prototyping helps solve wicked problems. DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-01303-9_2, © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014

H. Plattner et al. (Eds.), Design Thinking Research, Understanding Innovation. Introduction. DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-01303-9_2, © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014

Ideo / Riverdale (2012) Design Thinking for Educators (open source). Version 2. http://www.designthinkingforeducators.com/toolkit

Berengueres, J. (2014) The Brown Book of Design Thinking, 1st Ed. UAE University / CETEL. Abu Dhabi. (iBooks Edition).