Design Thinking

If you’re an educational professional who are looking to progress into management and consultancy, or an educational planning or development role, this is the best degree for you.

Thinking like a designer can transform the way individuals and organizations develop products, services, processes, and strategy. This approach, which is known as design thinking, brings together what is desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable. This is a creative approach to problem solving pioneered by the design firm IDEO. This is an intensive, hands-on learning experience that will challenge students to get out of their chair and out into the real world to talk to people and test the ideas. Design thinking emphasizes deep user understanding, iteration, and a focus on possibilities as a way to enhance value creation for stakeholders. Students start in the field, where they discover the needs of the target users. They then iterate ideas on teams to develop a range of promising possible solutions, create rough prototypes to take back out into the field, and test with real people in the target users.

The course will be teamwork-oriented, but students will also complete readings and independent activities that support the group work and ensure individual depth of knowledge.

The PLP in Drafting Legislation, Regulation, and Policy has been offered by the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies with considerable success since 2004.

Couse objectives: 

The course aims to:

• Introduce students to a new approach—design thinking—that enhances innovation activities in terms of market impact, value creation, and speed.
• Expand students’ thinking about design and innovation beyond the design and development of new products to other fundamental sources of value creation.
• Strengthen students’ individual and collaborative capabilities to identify customer needs, create sound concept hypotheses, collect appropriate data, and develop a prototype that allows for meaningful feedback in a real-world environment.
• Teach students to translate broadly defined opportunities into actionable innovation possibilities and recommendations for client organizations.
• Provide an authentic opportunity for students to develop teamwork and leadership skills.