Design Thinking for Sustainable Design & Development

About

Design thinking is a powerful holistic process, which aims to shift the paradigm and focus from innovation centered on technology and economy towards the one on human needs and experiences. This process is iterative and flexible, emphasizing the collaboration between innovators and users.

In the course, the students will learn, understand and develop the essential processes and skills behind Design Thinking. The course will enable them to connect with potential users, identify their needs, and systematically ideate, prototype, and test ideas for products and services. Through a series of practical and accumulative exercises, the students will create a Design Thinking project that is concrete and specific to their major fields.

Course leader

Stefanie Holzheu, Dipl.-Ing., M.Arch. is a media architect, creative technologist, and lab manager of Prototype Showcase of the Futurium Lab and the Open Lab Night, an informal learning program, at Futurium, Berlin.

Target group

Students and professionals in business & marketing, product & service development, design, engineering, and architecture.

Course aim

Learning Goals:

Upon successful completion of the course, the students will gain solid understanding of design thinking. They will be able to apply the five-stage model of design thinking defined by Hasso-Plattner Institute:

-Empathize – understand your needs and the problem to solve to meet such needs
-Define – analyze observations and synthesize them into a human-centered problem statement
-Ideate – identify new solutions
-Prototype – investigate the hypothetical solutions through low-cost, scaled down prototypes
-Test – test the best solutions identified during prototyping

Fee info