Design Thinking for Novices

Design Thinking for Novices: Designing a Corporate Training to Embed Design Thinking in Organisations

Blok, Joris (TU Delft Industrial Design Engineering)

Diehl, Jan-Carel (mentor)
Brouwer, Willemijn (mentor)

Delft University of Technology

Strategic Product Design

2020-05-01

In this project, executed by graduation student Joris Blok from Delft University of Technology, a multi-day course has been designed that allows Design Thinking to be embedded in organisations successfully. The course teaches the Design Thinking process, as well as a set of essential mindsets for Design Thinking novices. Furthermore, the course empowers participants to integrate Design Thinking into their context at work. This project taps into the quality of current courses on the market, which is insufficient for people to understand Design Thinking as well as to comprehend how Design Thinking can be applied in practice. The project has taken on a design-led approach. After a quick benchmark of several existing courses, a literature study has been executed. Subsequently, an existing course has been observed, and different interviews have been conducted with eight people from the target group, two Design Thinking trainers and ten participants that have participated in a Design Thinking course. These observations and interviews have led to several insights for the new course. Furthermore, as a set of key mindsets for Design Thinking novices has been selected based on a co-creation session with three design students and four people from the target group. The results have been used to develop an operational framework for Design Thinking novices, which integrates the Design Thinking process and key mindsets. This framework, as well as constructive alignment, have led to the realisation of a prototype of the course. The prototype has been validated with twenty participants, divided over two different settings (i.e. an in-company course in the private sector and an open course in the public sector). The validation of the prototype has proven that the course is projectable in both situations. Furthermore, the activities of the course enable participants to accomplish the learning objectives. Follow-up interviews have shown that participants actively integrate the key mindsets after the course into their context at work. An additional insight from the interviews was that the course must contain an overview of all the design methods and tools with practical guidelines to enable the participants to apply the Design Thinking process after the course. Furthermore, the course must empower participants to convince others in their context of the added value of Design Thinking in projects. Based on these results, the prototype has been iterated and refined, and a final product has been presented, which is assumed to allow Design Thinking to be embedded in organisations successfully.

Design Thinking
Mindsets
Corporate
Course
Training
Novices

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:fa469424-0a07-4aad-8aab-cc80d4034819

Student theses

master thesis

© 2020 Joris Blok