Design Thinking for Higher Education

We are convinced that Design thinking (DT) has huge potential to address the priorities identified in the Advance HE leadership survey: collaboration capabilities, staff wellbeing, inclusion, communication, enabling change, integrity, belonging. That said, DT isn’t a magic bullet. We have also experienced – and conceptualised – the barriers to applying DT within universities. In our own practice we are working creatively to navigate these challenges and support each other. Our project will develop, codify, and share approaches to supporting ‘ways in’ to DT. While the overall principles of DT are proven and well established, many off the shelf resources are business-based and unrelated to HE. The UKPSF offers a useful framework to create DT methods which ‘fit’ to the activities, knowledge and values of HE staff.

The project welcomed over 100 educators in three ‘collaboratories’, collaborative experimental laboratories, where we employed co-creation, prototyping, testing, and iteration. The final project outputs that have been tested at our final collboratory in Lancaster in June 2024 will be published on the Advance HE Knowledge HUB in autumn 2024. Here is a video summary of our prototyping stage where you will be able to soak up the designerly energy and see our approach in action.