kevin l. schultz (short bio)

designer | master inventor | UXPA | IDSA
IBM Design
Industrial Design Program, United States

Camillo Sassano (short bio)

Design Principal | Industrial Design Program Lead
Ph.D. - IDSA - Master Inventor, United States

Objectives:

The goals of the workshop are two-fold.

Goal 1 is to provide a high-level overview of the impact of using design thinking and user-focused framework in a major company like IBM (Forrester's Study, "The Total Economic Impact of IBM’s Design Thinking Practice".)

Goal 2 is to give participants hands-on experience with the framework, and understand how design can drive innovation and invention for any product or service.

Content and benefits:

The workshop will begin with a review of Forrester’s study about the adoption of Enterprise Design Thinking, resulting in a return on investment (ROI) up to 300%.

Next we’ll walk through a high-level overview of IBM's Enterprise Design Thinking framework, including: The Principles - a focus on user outcomes, diverse empowered teams, and restless reinvention.  The Loop - observe, reflect, and make.  The Keys - hills, playbacks, and sponsor users.

Following, we will give the participants a design challenge.  We will work with them to plan the activities for the remainder of the workshop, allowing them to better understand the important aspects of creating and running a workshop; planning, diverse teams, value of pre-workshop research, good facilitation and time-boxing, etc.  We will group the participants into smaller teams and start to concentrate on users in the challenge (empathy maps) as well as the user's current tasks (as-is scenarios).  

Next comes the most critical item in helping drive innovation - identifying pain-points.  Only by fully understanding the pain-points; whether too much time, too many steps, not enough information, too difficult, can one move onto creating big ideas to resolve those pain-points.  The teams will use various methods to create numerous ideas, prioritize those ideas and develop storyboards around them, all focused on improving the user experience.  Observe.  Reflect.  Make.

Included, will be examples of how we personally use design thinking in our regular Industrial Design practice to create new intellectual property - patents.

The participants will come away with knowledge and real experience on how design thinking leads to innovation that matters.

Target Audience:

Students, faculty and professionals who have limited experience with design thinking in practice. For those that have read about design thinking and may have taken online introductions but have not organized or participated fully in design thinking activities, as part of their day-to-day operations.