Design Thinking Process and Methods

Forward thinking companies are upskilling their employees to face an ever-changing world. Enhance your capabilities and skills through this fast-paced short-course. Design Thinking (D-T) is a creative problem-solving approach that is applied in many fields to change, improve or innovate on products, services, systems and processes. It can help individuals and teams gain confidence and solve problems across a wide range of scenarios. In these workshops you will learn how to approach problem solving through the Design Thinking process and methods. You will get an understanding of how to move from opportunity identification to selection of ideas, to quick prototyping and testing.

We invite participants to get in quick and register to secure a place in the PDMA-NZ Workshops, in order to upskill for professional growth.

Outcomes of Workshops:

1. Understand the Design Thinking process, principles and methods
2. Learn how to approach an open-ended problem, and when to apply the methods
3. Provide support and guidance to young engineers, recent graduates industry, product/service innovators and designers to approach projects with confidence and create real value for customers using the D-T framework.

All participants will receive a PDMA-NZ Certificate for attending the sessions and completing the programme.

Overview of Content

This workshop is split up into two days:

16th of February: 2:00pm-5:00pm

23rd of February: 2:00pm-5:00pm

Pricing covers attendance for both days.

These workshops are delivered using a hands-on, fun approach where participants will get the opportunity to use the tools and methods first-hand through a series of exercises, to embed knowledge and build confidence in individual- and team work tasks.

Design Thinking Principles and Mind-set

In this session, participants understand the importance and value of the right mind-set and principles to take on open-ended challenges. This helps build a user-centric outlook that captures the customers’ perspectives to identify meaningful solutions.

Five Stages of Design Thinking Process

1. Empathy – methods to create deep insights

2. Define – provides better direction to the project

3. Ideate – generate multiple solution ideas

4. Prototype – build something quickly to show and share

5. Test and refine your potential solution

Methods of Design Thinking

• Tried and tested methods to uncover user needs - Empathy maps, Journey maps, Personas, 5 Whys method, User stories
• Synthesize information: Open-Closed statements, scope and focus
• Diverge and converge: Generating alternatives is aided through the D-T process. Brainstorming, analogy and biomimicry are just some techniques to stimulate ideas.
• Participants explore selection matrices to critically choose ideas
• Test for quick feedback

Workshop Facilitator - Dr Aruna Shekar (PhD, NPDP)

Aruna Shekar has taught Product Innovation for 25 years at Massey University, New Zealand. With a PhD in Product Development, she has coordinated many innovation projects with industry and trained thousands of tertiary students. She has worked with Prof David Kelly and Prof Larry Leifer at Stanford University on Design Thinking.

As an educator, she champions the application of design thinking and product management skills that help lead and manage innovation projects and generate meaningful solutions. Her passion is to develop people’s innovation and creative mind-sets so that they can solve problems and create better solutions.

View Aruna’s LinkedIn profile here

COVID-19 Notice:

In the event of alert levels preventing us from holding this event as planned, we reserve the right to postpone the event or hold the workshop online. Under these circumstances, a full refund will be provided if this does not suit the attendee. Fingers crossed everything goes to plan!