4-Week Online Design Thinking Fundamentals Course

This interactive online course will equip you with the Design Thinking mindset, tools and skills to kick-start bold innovation. You will be working virtually on a human-centered challenge under live guidance of our skilled facilitators. With a combination of live classroom sessions, group assignments and homework you will gain practical knowledge and experience to apply Design Thinking in your daily work.

Key benefits

• Learning and working alongside leading coaches;
  
• Opportunity to use the downtime to up-skill the workforce;
  
• No need to travel;
  
• Get introduced to new tools and methods for your teams to keep collaborating virtually;
  
• Work with colleagues geographically dispersed, with whom you don’t usually interact;
  
• Spread over 8 bite-sized 2-hour sessions, this course format is less disruptive to regular work rhythm;

Our approach

You’ll be introduced to Design Thinking by directly experiencing a set of tools and methods under the guidance of our leading coaches, which you can then use to shape and improve the services you offer.

You will gain a foundational understanding of the principles and mindsets that underpin Design Thinking, and you will gain practical experience with Design Thinking’s key tools and processes. Armed with this new understanding, you’ll return to work with an approach that reaches for more engaging, open-minded, expansive and human-centric solutions.

All tools covered will be made available to you, so that you can take these and start applying them the very next day after the course on your personal or work life.

The course takes place in 9 sessions (including on-boarding).

Program

The course consists out of Modules, focusing on the 4 stages of Design Thinking: Discover, Define, Design, Deliver. Each week consists of interactive online classrooms sessions, followed by group work.

Module 1: Discover
We will kick off with an introduction to the Design Thinking principles, tools and best practices. Then we will dive into the challenge using tools such as Design Research, Stakeholder Map and Mind Map. We will wrap up the Discovery Phase by creating strong Personas.

Module 2: Define
This phase is dedicated to finding interesting opportunity areas: understanding frustrations to find problems that are worth solving. Using the Customer Journey Map we can identify impactful moments within the decision-making process. With that knowledge we can proceed to reframe the challenge into a Problem Statement.

Module 3: Develop
Now that we have a good understanding of the problem area, it’s time to develop new solutions. Ideation! We will work with several ‘divergent thinking’ tools and cluster these ideas in an Idea Priority Map. The following step will be to prototype these ideas using Service Scenarios.

Module 4: Deliver
The final module we will focus on testing the prototypes and improving the concept. This iterative process will be concluded by making a strong pitch. We conclude our classroom sessions with time to reflect and develop your personal implementation plan.

Certificate
After completing the program and assignments you can celebrate your achievement of becoming a true Design Thinker. All tools and materials will be available after the course for personal use. A certificate from DesignThinkers Academy is awarded to participants who successfully complete the course.

Trainers

Julien Zidaru, Partner and Facilitator at DesignThinkers Academy Eastern Europe, has almost 20 years background in management & business consultancy and also strong experience in facilitating and developing Service Design Thinking training sessions.

Diana Simion is trainer and marketing research consultant, with a PhD in communication studies and strong background in academic and marketing research, psycho-sociology and communication studies.