Are you looking for innovations in digital products and services, but run short of new ideas? Or maybe you have ideas, but can't decide whether they are brilliant or a dead end? In our workshop you will experience Design Thinking in order to avoid the trap of conventional thought patterns and to boost creativity and innovation to find new solutions for issues that have proven to be tough to crack.
Maximum number of participants: 30
Target Audience: IT Professionals, Project Leader, Decision Makers, Change Managers, Software Architects, Developers
Prerequisites: Be curious and keep an open mind - no prerequisite knowledge needed
Level: Introductory
Extended Abstract
Are you looking for innovations in digital products and services, but run short of new ideas? Or maybe you have ideas, but can't decide whether they are brilliant or a dead end? In our workshop you can learn an approach to help you find and evaluate practical ideas: Design Thinking. It is a brainstorming method that helps you tackle big, fuzzy ideas piece by piece, which makes it especially helpful in software architecture and system design. In our workshop you will learn the basic steps you need in order to avoid the trap of conventional thought patterns and to boost creativity and innovation to find new solutions for issues that have proven to be tough to crack. How is it done? A core principle of Design Thinking is to question, evaluate and revise your assumptions - what you think you already know - in order to break complacency and bad habits.
Are you the kind of person who likes to try out new things? In our workshop you will have the chance to learn and apply all steps of design thinking, demonstrated on the task of improving the conference traveling experience of the other participants. First you will empathize with other participants in order to discover their needs and pains. After brainstorming new ideas, it will be your task to evaluate them and identify which are the most promising. You will then translate the best one into a so called prototype in order to have an artifact to interact with. In the final part you will do a single iteration of incremental testing and evaluation.
After experiencing all steps of Design Thinking, we will discuss potential problems for applying it in your everyday work. We will provide you with recommendations as well as tips and tricks on how design thinking can improve software development processes, e.g. requirements engineering or collecting user acceptance tests.
In this workshop you will learn the formal components Design Thinking and practice their application to common, everyday problems.