Design Thinking is a method of creating innovative projects, products and services based on a deep understanding of the users’ problems and needs.
Design Thinking includes:
- focus on the user- understanding his conscious and unconscious needs,
- interdisciplinary team- looking at the problem from multiple perspectives,
- experimenting and frequent testing of hypotheses- constructing prototypes and gathering feedback from users.
The first step in DT is to build an interdisciplinary team of people who can look at the problem from different perspectives. The team then follows, step-by-step, subsequent stages of the method using a set of tools and techniques to develop a viable solution. The interdisciplinarity of Design Thinking will allow you to notice various aspects of a problem. Looking at the same issue from different perspectives from the very start will make it possible to avoid many difficulties in its further realization. Such an approach enables the fusion of the most distant ideas into an interdisciplinary solution to a given problem.
Due to its versatility, Design Thinking is applicable whenever we encounter so called “wicked problems”, which are problems that do not have one obvious solution or rigid framework. Entirely bad ideas are non-existent in this method, because even the ones less appropriate may encourage other members of your group to look at a problem from
a completely different perspective. The Design Thinking method has been used in students’ problem-based projects at IFE for several years. Classes are conducted at the fourth semester of studies and are addressed to students of all study programmes.
Some of the solutions proposed by our students through the use of Design Thinking have been appreciated in international forums. The projects “Electronic content optimization system for visually impaired persons” or “Automated driver notification system of emergency vehicles in city traffic” have won medals at invention and innovation exhibitions as well as in the World Cup of Computer-Implemented Inventions in the years 2008-2011. One of our students became a finalist of the ITU Young World Innovator competition as part of the global telecommunication exhibition.
You can receive a maximum of 10 ECTS credits for a DT project.