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 collaboratory in Lancaster in June 2024 and have been published here.

• We have a short questionnaire survey which should take less than 10 minutes to complete.
• We will be conducting short interviews of 20-30 minutes.