Author: gregorythomas

I have been giving this classic quote attributed to Charles Darwin quite a bit of thought lately, as in our modern world it has rang true for quite some time, and now that bell is almost deafening. Having a successful career (or business) now appears to require you to be able to reinvent yourself, your […]

The 10th session was the culmination of two weeks of learning about design thinking and applying the lessons to the wicked problem of increasing the number of refugees who access higher education. We presented our ideas to the rest of the class as well as the academic staff. But first there was a quick recap of […]

The introductory slide for this sessions talked about refining our business models and testing some of the assumptions we had made. Again iterative testing a prototyping really struck a chord with me in Agile software delivery we move from sketches to working  beta versions of software (a minimum viable product) that our customers could start using […]

Session 8 was where the rubber hit the road for our refugee access to higher education major project. I am not going to lie, I struggled a little with the inclusion of socio-cultural perspectives in this part of the design process and I felt like fit much more nicely back in the empathise phase of […]

The 7th session was focused on the 3rd phase of the Stanford design school design thinking process, which was the ideation phase. This is where we come up with creative solutions to solve the problems that we looked at in the emapthise and define phases. Brown (2009) postulated that design thinking involves moving between four mental state, […]

Session 6 saw a shift of focus and brought us to week two, of this two week intensive course. It also saw a shuffling of groups and a new assignment topic, which was to solve the wicked problem of refugees lagging behind in terms of representation in higher education. We return to look in more […]

Session 5 was the culmination of the first week of the course and the finalisation of a full circle of design thinking to come up with some interesting solutions to create more space, and transformational space in a home office. But more on that later. The idea of a Designer attitude as coined by Michlewski […]

Today we looked a little more closely at the idea of ethnographic research, I don’t mind admitting that this is the first time I have heard this term, despite probably having had been doing it for many years now. It’s a term often associated with anthropology to look at cultural phenomenon. Some tips and techniques […]

The third session of the course mostly looked to the idea of problem finding, with a suggested that design thinking was best applied to ‘wicked’ as opposed to ‘tame’ problems. (Rittel & Webber, 1973) COVID-19 was acknowledged as a good example of a wicked problem and I reflected on my own studies this year in […]

The second session saw us looking to ultimately define a ‘problem statement’ and to begin to consider some solutions to the problem. Ultimately this seemed to me to be like a different and more collaborative way of coming up with a ‘user story’ or ‘business requirement’. We started by looking at the concept of gift […]