Design Thinking

Welcome to the Design Thinking topic.

Here you train and certify the ability to work on ill-defined problems the way design does: understanding and reframing the problem before solving it, generating varied alternatives deliberately, making them tangible to learn from real people, co-creating with those who will live with the outcome, and widening the view from the user to the system. You will not learn a five-step recipe, but how to choose and combine practices according to what your team needs to understand, imagine, decide, make tangible, or learn, also when artificial intelligence takes part. It is a skill that complements Product Owner training, and it is also useful for Scrum Masters, facilitators, product leads, analysts, and technical leads who explore problems and solutions in agile environments.

The training covers the eight blocks of the topic's State of the art:

• What Design Thinking is and what it is for: the operational definition, ill-defined problems, its boundaries with user experience and discovery, and what fifteen years of critique teach.
• Frameworks as maps: d.school, Double Diamond, IDEO, LUMA, IBM, and Liedtka, all current and none a recipe; the Design Sprint as a format.
• Understanding and reframing the problem: the better frame versus the "real problem," observing with intent, empathizing within limits, synthesizing as a team up to the insight, and formulating the point of view and the "How might we…?"
• Diverging with method and converging with criteria: variety versus quantity, fixation and biases, the "alone first, then together" hybrid mode, the ideation protocol, and the convergence that does not end in the vote.
• Prototyping to think and to learn: the prototype as a question, just enough fidelity, what gets prototyped and with what, testing to learn and not to prove, and prototyping with AI.
• Co-creating, facilitating, and communicating: designing with people and the limits of participation, the design session in the room and remote, critique on ideas and prototypes, visual thinking, and communicating findings.
• From the user to the system: the limits of the user-centered approach, minimal systems thinking, impacts, exclusions, and consequences, and when to widen the focus.
• Designing your own design process, also with AI: choosing and combining practices, design abilities and professional maturity, who leads in each mode, and the risks specific to AI in design.