Design Thinking workshop.

I recently attended the Design Thinking workshop at Startup Edmonton, which combined ideas from the Stanford’s D-School and IDEO’s approaches to design into one hands-on, 3-hour session, where a complete stranger made me a wallet prototype. Design thinking is not a new concept and comes down to empathetic listening to your customers, coming up with ideas based on what they tell you and iterating back and forth until a product or service meets their genuine needs. You may remember Edmonton’s own Ben Weinlick talking about this approach when designing services for social good at the 2014 Netspeed Conference.

As part of the course, we also received handy resources to build on the introduction. Particularly, exploring the Methods at DesignKit.org and Mixtapes from D-School might be useful when proceeding with a new project.