Design Thinking for Technology

Engage in a Jamboard icebreaker to brainstorm with sticky notes, using pen, eraser, and save functions, while exploring design thinking foundations, Maslow’s hierarchy, human-centered problem solving, and terminologies.

During a timed activity, learners generate many alternative uses for a coffee mug, practicing divergent and creative thinking while contrasting with critical thinking to improve problem solving.

Discover the four major components of creative thinking, starting with fluency—the ability to generate many ideas and move from common to unique ones—then reflect on your own creativity, including flexibility.

Explore flexibility as a component of creative thinking by sorting ideas into themes and directions. Practice deliberate flexibility with any object to think in different directions through design thinking.

Explore elaboration and uniqueness as core components of creative thinking, illustrating how detailing usage and going beyond common ideas unlock innovative design.

Contrast creative thinking and critical thinking to show divergent idea generation and convergent analysis in design thinking for technology, defining creativity as original and relevant and innovation as accessible.

Explore why critical and creative thinking matter for technology challenges, distinguishing simple from wicked problems and showing how design thinking and creative problem solving guide effective, cost-aware solutions.

Explore design thinking as a human-centered problem solving methodology that uses technology to solve problems more innovatively, tracing its evolution from trial and error to lean and agile approaches.

Learn how to design a pen or craft an effective sales pitch by identifying key questions, target audience, unique features, usefulness, and demonstration strategies through design thinking.

Explore Maslow's hierarchy of needs from physiological to self-actualization, and apply these insights to design thinking through a pen case study and user-centered product design.

Explore design thinking by empathizing with children, then collaborate with pediatricians, teachers, and families inspired by a Stanford d.school course, iterating toward GE adventure series MRI improvements.

Design thinking centers the child user in GE Healthcare's MRI experience, using sea-themed storytelling and a ship-painted MRI machine to reduce sedation to under 0.5% and boost comfort and throughput.

Identify the features of design thinking, focusing on empathy for user needs, user experience, innovation, and creative and critical thinking, illustrated by a GE healthcare case study.

Explore design thinking as a human-centered problem-solving approach, reframing needs, brainstorming ideas, and using hands-on prototyping and testing within a mindset, framework, and toolkit.

Explore why design thinking, as a mindset and methodology, improves products and user experiences through early feedback and visual representation, guiding cost effective innovation.

Explore how innovation management intersects design thinking, with learning outcomes focused on human-centered innovation, empathy, observation, and diffusion of innovation through models and processes.

Start with an idea that addresses a market need and creates value, while designing solutions for stakeholders, testing for learning and adoption, and implementing and evaluating before scaling.

Differentiate invention from innovation by emphasizing customer value and commercial viability, showing how research, utility, affordability, and sustainability transform discoveries into sellable solutions.

Identify and analyze examples of innovation across products, processes, services, and technology, from an end-to-end onboarding system and Salesforce CRM to automotive feature enhancements.

Transform ideas into tangible products through design thinking, prototyping, and engineering. Show how creativity turns ideas into inventions and experiential innovations that improve technology and products.

Explore how an innovation framework provides a formal structure to tap ideas, evaluate strengths and weaknesses, and build strategies that turn viable concepts into business opportunities.

Explore why there is no one-size-fits-all innovation framework, and how the ten types split into configuration, offering, and experience, with configuration focusing on profit model, structure, process, and network.

Explore an innovation framework built on three stages: configuration, offering, and experience, to improve internal processes, product quality and features, and customer experience through strategic channels and marketing.

Apply types of innovation framework within design thinking for technology to understand how innovation types inform technology design.

Define a model of innovation as the deliberate correlation between why a company innovates and what it hopes to achieve, illustrated by Tesla and Kellogg's examples.

Examine three innovation models, inventor, problem solver, and refiner, through examples like Apple, Netflix, Nike, Ikea, and Toyota, highlighting disruptive innovation, customer needs, and superior processes.

Explore how conqueror, protector, and trend follower models shape technology strategy, from mass-market expansion and one-click delivery to brand prestige and agile trend adaptation.

Identify and compare innovation models, such as conqueror, innovator, inventor, and trend follower, and learn that companies can switch models in real time as they innovate.

The lecture outlines a seven-step innovation process, with steps six and seven often combined, beginning with requirements gathering and information gathering and ending with diffusion.

Explore diffusion of innovation theory by E. M. Rogers and how ideas spread through populations via word of mouth and digital channels to gain market share.

Explore the five stages of technology adoption—innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards—and analyze how diffusion of innovation guides strategy and market reach.

Demonstrate how diffusion of innovation operates when a pharmaceutical company launches a new medicine, engaging doctors as promoters and relying on peer validation before widespread adoption.

Define innovation in the context of design thinking, linking design thinking to human-centered, solution-based innovation and illustrating the relationship through practical activities and real-world design examples.

Explore how design thinking's four stages, clarify, ideate, develop, and implement, drive commercial, scalable innovation by validating utility and aligning with market needs and customers.

Leverage design thinking to drive innovation in organizations by applying empathy, ideation, prototype, test, and define stages, guided by user perspectives and ongoing feedback.

Engage in a hands-on activity to apply design thinking by redesigning a daily-use product, using Jamboard and sticky notes to explore feasibility, empathy, and added utility.