Assessment that consists of two components:
Oral presentation of Design Thinking process
Written report, critically discussing the challenges of implementing the Design Thinking process in established organisations
At the start of term, you are required to join a team (3-5 students per team). Throughout the term, teams will undertake the following activities:
identify a problem that could be addressed/improved through Design Thinking (the problem may be of a social, service, commercial or digital nature);
use Design Thinking tools, techniques and mind-set to develop ideas for innovations that address/improve the problem you have identifïed;
consider future steps to launch the innovative solution;
present the Design Thinking process that you have applied to identify the problem and achieve the innovative solution; and
develop a written report critically discussing the challenges of implementing Design Thinking in established organisations.
You will have the opportunity to experience and apply relevant tools and techniques throughout the term and you are STRONGLY encouraged to actively and creatively make use of opportunities provided in-class (on-campus students) and online (distance students) to practice and reï¬ ne your Design Thinking skills and solutions.
Presentation:
The presentation looks to the past in that it should report on the Design Thinking activities your team has carried out to get to the innovative solution(s) you have incubated - there is no maximum of activities you should carry out as this depends upon how you progress your innovation and whether you have repeated some activities multiple times. However, as an absolute minimum, you are expected to report on 10 activities as per the prescribed textbook. Your presentation must cover the following:
What you have done (activities);
What the outcomes of these activities were;
What outcome(s) you chose and why;
Where - within the Design Thinking process - you are at the point of presenting.
You should ensure that you go beyond purely describing the activities and instead include some critical evaluation of the tools' merit to your particular Design Thinking process. The description of activities, tools and techniques requires references to relevant literature and evidence of your involvement with these activities. You can evidence this, for instance, by including photographs of your activities that you should be compiling for your blog in assessment 3 anyway, but please remember that this group report deals with your ACTIVITIES and their OUTCOMES, not with the REFLECTIONS on your personal learning - the latter is the content of assessment 3. An absolute minimum of 8 academic references is required. Further supporting material is available in Moodle.
Presentations should be between 13 and 15 minutes in duration - presenters will be stopped if they go over the 15 minute mark. Each team member should contribute roughly equally. Presentations should make use of PowerPoint slides, which have to be submitted via Moodle. Prezi or other approaches are only permitted with PRIOR approval from the unit co-ordinator. You are encouraged to utilise other visual aids (printed diagrams, prototypes, etc.) to support your presentation.
On-campus students: You will present live in class during the workshop in week 10 or 11.
Distance students: You have two options:
A) you can choose to deliver your presentation live to the unit co-coordinator via video conference in week 10 or 11; or
B) you can choose to record your presentation and submit the video ï¬ le via Moodle or YouTube. If you select this option, you should record each team member presenting their part of the presentation and then combine the recordings into one single video ï¬ le. Please note that it is important that you are visible in the presentation video - hence, submitting slides with voice-over is not sufficient for this assessment. It is recommended you use software such as Camtasia or zoom, which allows you to be in the video, while also giving you the opportunity to share your PowerPoint slides with the audience. It is your responsibility to ensure appropriate video and audio quality.
Report:
The report should be 1,250 to 1,500 words, excluding preliminaries, tables, ï¬ gures, references and appendices.
To successfully complete this part of the assessment, you are required to research literature about the challenges that organisations face when trying to implement Design Thinking. You are required to compare your group's experience of Design Thinking with the realities of implementing Design Thinking in an established organisation, based on your literature research. You may choose a speciï¬ c organisation or you may keep your discussion generic. An absolute minimum of 8 references is required (most of these must be academic, peer-reviewed publications, but some may be high-quality practitioner reports).
Assessment 2 (GROUP presentation and report):
- Work in your groups to identify and deeply understand a problem of your choosing.
- If your group has not chosen a problem yet, you need to choose one this week!
- Remember that we are not looking for a solution yet, so please don't start by identifying a new innovation you want to propose - instead, focus on framing a problem that you can investigate with the help of 10+ Design Thinking tools.
- At the same time as you apply these DT tools, you need to READ LITERATURE about these tools and about implementing DT in organisations. Both presentation and report need to make reference to literature (remember: we need in-text references AND a reference list!).
- Keep EVIDENCE of your DT activities (e.g. photos of your group work, scanned documents, short videos, etc.) - this needs to go into the presentation.
- Slides and report need to be submitted by the deadline as per the unit profile.