Solve Anything! Building Ideas through Design - Mar 2010

This course is a team-based creative lab, and we will explore and experiment with two questions: what makes ideas successful? How does one develop an idea in response to a problem, and then nurture it into a product, service, or experience?

In this six-week course, we turn to design thinking - here meaning a creative, user-centric but systemic approach to problem solving - to answer these questions. 

We'll cover some basics about new product development and look at case studies of successful and unsuccessful ideas to understand why they ended up with the fate they did. Most importantly, class participants will identify and submit community problems that can be tackled through design. As a group, we will select problems that are most addressable in the context of a six weeks. Then, we'll learn and practice creative, user-centric, hands-on methods - think brainstorming, ethnographic user research, and prototyping - to quickly generate, validate, and ultimately build solutions to our chosen problems. Along the way, we'll learn about framing problems for better solutions, managing the creative process, and innovating in teams remotely. 

Ultimately, we'll end up with prototyped solutions and a recipe for further action to our chosen problems. An added outcome will be confidence that with applied creativity, systems thinking, and teamwork anything can be solved through design.