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.

We will host three ‘collaboratories’, collaborative experimental laboratories, for experienced and ‘design-curious’ educators, which will employ co-creation, prototyping, testing, and iteration. Outputs will be visible in online presence which will also allow asynchronous participation in our process. We will model visualisation as an enabler of collaboration, as it is a key DT competency we have identified as lacking in HE.