Professor Widom offers workshops in design thinking and collaborative problem-solving that take one full day. Participants will learn the basics of design thinking, including design processes, innovation methodologies, need finding, human factors, rapid prototyping, and team dynamics. The workshops are participatory and interactive: Participants form collaborative teams to put their learning into practice solving real-world challenges, and teams share their challenges and creative successes.
Because of the hands-on nature, each workshop is strictly limited to 30 participants.
No specific background is needed.
Design Thinking is a popular concept pioneered at Stanford's Hasso Plattner Institute for Design, known as the d.school. It's a new way of approaching complex problem-solving tasks, focused on finding creative, collaborative, human-centered solutions. Design thinking draws on methods from engineering and design, and combines them with ideas from the arts, tools from the social sciences, and insights from the business world. Students of design thinking frequently cite a significant boost in personal "creative confidence", transforming how they approach a wide variety of studies and endeavors.
