Design Thinking

Catalog description

Design Thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation and problem-solving that can be applied to any discipline. Thinking like a designer is believed to rapidly develop concepts, products, services, strategies, and systems. This course will examine the origins and spread of Design Thinking and show how it is used to solve problems and create solutions that improve organizations. This course is split into two parts. The first part of this course introduces students to the theory of Design Thinking. The aim is to equip students with the mindset and thorough understanding of the human-centered approach. The second part of this course is practice based. Students will be introduced to a series of scenarios from local organizations that highlight a central problem that they are facing, i.e., case studies, and are required to address these whilst applying the theory taught in Part I of the course. By the end of the course, students will develop the basic competencies of a design thinker which includes but is not limited to the ability to ask better questions, create experiments, and curate the ideas of others when tackling problems across organizations.