Course Summary

You may have heard the exciting stories about design thinking and wondered what it is and whether it is for you. In this course, you will experience design thinking. To start down the path toward innovative solutions, focus on the problem first: Develop empathy for your users by “putting yourself in their shoes”, and further understand their perspectives by defining a point-of-view statement. From there, you will start generating ideas and then move on to building low-resolution prototypes, which you can take back to your users for feedback. This will prepare you for the deliver phase, where you will learn how design thinking is connected to lean principles and single-piece processing.

Although design thinking can be applied to a wide range of problem contexts, we focus specifically on its application to software development. The course uses easy-to-understand, real-world examples, and allows you to collaborate with fellow students on a real-life challenge. Welcome to the course and we hope you enjoy the journey!

Course Flow per Week

Course Characteristics

• Starting from: September 14, 2015, 09:00 UTC. (What does this mean?)
• Duration: 7 weeks (3-5 hours per week)
• Course language: English

Course Content

• Getting Started: Course Preparation Week
  
• Week 1: Overview of Design Thinking
• Week 2: Empathy Phase
• Week 3: Define Phase
• Week 4: Ideate Phase
• Week 5: Prototype & Test Phases
• Week 6: Deliver Phase

Target Audience

• Anyone interested in Design Thinking
• Software professionals
• University students

Course Requirements

Willingness to work in a team and collaborate with other course participants

Working in Groups

Design thinking is about teamwork and about collaboration within groups. To enable you to learn about design thinking effectively and apply it in the future, you will be assigned to a group.
In the course preparation week, we will set up the groups in such a way that you are located as close as possible to each other, but there will be participants who will have to work in virtual mode. In this case, we will make sure that you are grouped with other participants in similar time zones.
During the course, you will meet regularly either in person or virtually, and you will collaborate closely with your peers to complete collaborative activities.

About the Instructors

Dr. Moritz Gekeler

Design Strategist, Design and Co-Innovation Center, SAP

As a member of the Design and Co-Innovation Center at SAP Moritz leads strategic design and co-innovation projects with customers from various industries. He facilitates the design process, hosts workshops and conducts deep dive research sessions. Moritz has a strong background in strategic design thinking, design facilitation and teaching. Before joining SAP he worked for the HPI School of Design Thinking and for the futures studies department of Daimler AG. On the side he is regularly engaged as a lecturer at various universities teaching design theory and innovation strategy.

Jochen Guertler

Strategic Design Consultant, Design and Co-Innovation Center, SAP

In his role as strategic design consultant Jochen setups and runs Design Thinking workshops and projects with SAP customers. Besides that he is an business coach and also teacher at the School of Design Thinking at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam. Jochen is co-author of two books about Design Thinking and loves to use Design Thinking also as motivation for people and teams to grow and learn also on a personal level.

George Kembel

Global Director and Co-Founder, Stanford d.school

George is an entrepreneur and investor turned educator. He co-founded the d.school and now leads its global effort. Passionate about nurturing the creative potential of others, George spends his time working with students, teachers, leaders, and investors to unlock the latent innovative capacity of their teams and organizations.
http://dschool.stanford.edu/bio/george-kembel/