Design Thinking Crash Course and Workshops Series

Design Thinking stresses the importance of empathy, framing problems and creating solution in any situation. While innovation and collaboration skills are becoming increasing vital, how to teach students and design courses to better equip our learners with these essential skills reminds a challenge to many.

The crash course and workshops intend to introduce design thinking to participants through direct experience, and explore how it can be embedded into course design.

Design Thinking Crash Course

Focused on listening, empathy, all-round thinking, collaboration, and experimentation, design thinking can be applied in any field and any experience, be it research, teaching or business. This workshop will lead you through the design thinking process and you will gain an understanding of the overall process of Design Thinking spanning across Inspiration, Ideation, and Implementation. Specifically, you will learn how to be inspired observers of their world so that new opportunities will be identified more readily. Methods will be introduced that help generate more Ideas more quickly. Finally, you will gain experience in how to transition their ideas into implementable products or concepts.

This will be a hands-on workshop where an example problem will be utilized to introduce Design Thinking methods and processes than can be extended to fit with one’s work.

Design Thinking in Course Design Workshops

These two workshops will focus on how to embed Design Thinking concepts such as observation and empathy into course material. In addition, methods and techniques will be discussed to ensure that course material is responsive to students learning needs and outcomes.

• Workshop 1 will be an overview of the relevant Design Thinking topics
• Workshop 2 will be focused on producing and commenting on particular curriculum examples and approaches

These are highly interactive workshops where curriculum development examples will be presented and discussed as a group. New techniques and methods will be utilized that have been vetted at the University of Utah. Participants may attend one or another or both.

Course Design Workshop 1: Design Thinking in Course Design – Overview

Course Design Workshop 2: Design Thinking in Course Design – Curriculum Examples

About the Speaker:

James Agutter James Agutter is the founder of the Multi-Disciplinary Design Program and the Director of the Spark Design Initiative. His work has focused on the application and translation of design principles, practices, and processes in a variety of domains. These range from product design and evaluation in numerous fields, social entrepreneurship, and higher education program development. He has published widely, generated over 10 million dollars in grant awards and been awarded 7 United States patents. He has won numerous awards for his work, including Creative Achievement Award by Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, University of Utah Early Career Teaching Award, University of Utah Beacon of Excellence Award and the University of Utah Distinguished Innovation and Impact Award. He is an Associate Professor of Design in the College of Architecture + Planning at the University of Utah.