DT.UNI. Design Thinking Approach for an Interdisciplinary University
What is it?
DT. UNI. will explore and develop design-led thinking approaches which support innovation in higher education institutions by using a bottom-up approach, i.e. supporting students, researchers, academics and management staff in developing their ability to think in a more divergent, creative and design thinking way.
Design thinking workshop for higher education academics held on Monday 15 January 2020
The BCU DT.Uni project team ran a one day Design Thinking workshop at STEAMhouse for academics from across BCU Faculties, alongside academics from other HE organisations, including Coventry, Wolverhampton and Aston Business School, as part of the ERASMUS+ DT.Uni project.
The workshop was designed specifically for academics and aimed to skill-up participants to enable them to apply design thinking techniques into their day-to-day work within their own institution/ area of work, and explored how DT can be embedded into the curriculum as well as implemented in higher education working practices.
The workshop was facilitated by:
- Claudia Carter, Associate Professor, School of Engineering and Built Environment, CEBE, BCU
- Zuby Ahmed, Associate Professor, Games Design, Gamer Camp, ADM, BCU
- Coordinator/facilitator: Charmaine Stint, Senior Development Manager, RIEE, BCU
DT tools:
The workshop facilitators took the participants through each of the key stages of Design Thinking: Explore, Create, Prototype, Evaluate, where participants worked with DT Methods and Tools including: Customer Journey, Brainstorming, Brainwriting (Challenge definition), Pitch exercise (sharing & testing ideas), Prototyping (making), dynamic refinement, Presenting solutions to the challenge.
The workshop approach:
Through the workshop activity participants gained hands-on experience of implementing Design Thinking (DT) tools and techniques. Participants were encouraged to consider working in different ways, skilling them up, through thinking about challenges in a more divergent and creative way by applying DT techniques. Participants applied and tested didactic material within the DT process, helping them to think about how they and their colleagues could apply the process directly to their own work within an academic context.
The teams worked interdisciplinary; each group was made up by randomly selecting participants so that the groups were diverse in their areas of expertise and levels of experience and not made up from colleagues who would normally work together. The participants were from a range of academic roles including teachers, researchers and those who also had a management element to their role.
Participants benefitted from the workshops in multiple ways. They gained hands-on experience of implementing Design Thinking (DT) tools and techniques; taking time out to consider how by applying DT techniques could support working in different ways as well as thinking about the many demands on the HE system in a more divergent and creative way. Working in small interdisciplinary teams to learn and practice DT methods and how the process could be applied to a shared, real world academic challenge resulted in new exchanges of knowledge and idea generation. Some of the areas of discussion included Complexity – increasingly, problem solving requires interdisciplinary working across subject areas, institutional hierarchies and barriers; Scarce resources and balancing these between teaching and research; The need to design educational experiences for the next generation to embrace individuality and meaning through studying and working
Follow up:
The didactic material for the DT workshop is now collated within an e-book as a resource which can be accessed through the BC project webpage. An open source licence allows free access and provides the presented Design Thinking methods to academia and other interested parties.
The DT.Uni project has produced a range of online resources as a result of the knowledge exchange and research undertaken throughout the project. These resources are free to download, use and share. Each output addresses the use of Design Thinking from a different approach or user perspective. We hope that you find these resources useful.