Design Thinking for Your Creative Practice
Skills and methods to help you work like a designer
We are pleased to inform you of the exciting workshop; “Design Thinking for Your Creative Practice”, to be held in coming October and start of call for applications of the workshop. This workshop has been held at Tokyo Tech every year since 2014 and got over-subscription every time. The workshop has a reputation for its effectiveness to understand the core of Design Thinking; concepts of Creative Confidence and User Centric. The workshop is also informative and enjoyable by its speedy Sillicon Valley style process by 3 facilitators and instructors invited from the US. This year, it will be held online, connecting with the tutors in the US.
It is essential for students to have the capability of “leadership” and “entrepreneurship” in a borderless society in order to generate new values, and “Design Thinking” is a fundamental concept and methodology for such “leadership” and “entrepreneurship” skills. Many Japanese and international enterprises are actually asking their employees to learn and utilize the concept of “Design Thinking”.
Instructors of the workshop are Thomas Both, David Janka, and Scott Witthoft. They are all professional product designers and educators. They teach design thinking at Stanford University d.school, the University of Texas at Austin, and at organizations around the world. The instructors are happy to return to Tokyo Tech again this year for the 9th time!
- Although this workshop will be held as a part of ToTAL (Tokyo Tech Academy for Leadership) ‘s course of “Fundamental Group Work for Leadership I/II (F)”, any Tokyo Tech students who are not applying to the above course or students from other universities can also apply to this workshop. (Credits will not be granted to those students outside of Tokyo Tech.)
- This workshop has been designated as an event for “Cross the border! Tokyo-Tech pioneering doctoral research project” students at Tokyo Tech.
（Last year’s workshop）
<Outline and Registration>
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Date & Time |
●Day 1: 15/Oct (Sat) 08:30-13:00 |
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Max. number of students | 30 students |
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Notes | ●In addition to ToTAL students and students who register to ToTAL’s course of either “Fundamental Group Work for Leadership I/II (F)” or “(Master’s/Doctoral) Essential Group Work for Leadership (F)”, any Tokyo Tech students and any students of other universities may apply to the workshop. |
●There will be a selection in case of over-subscription.
●With regard to the selection, both ToTAL students and students who have registered for ToTAL course may have a priority, and your answers to the Application Form below; “Please indicate your English capability, such as “Native”, “Advanced”, “Intermediate”, or “Beginner”, and/or score of English assessment tests including TOEFL, TOEIC, IELTS, Cambridge and/or EIKEN” and “Your aim(s) or expectations you have for this workshop, or motivation for joining the workshop.” will be taken into consideration.
●Attendants of this workshop need to make a commitment to: (1) attend all 3 days, and (2) not be late nor leave early for all 3 days.
Language
English
*This workshop will be held entirely in English.
(Scores over 750 for TOEIC and 80 for TOEFL iBT are preferable.)
Fee
Free
Application deadline
3/Oct/2022 (Mon)
Tools for online workshop
ZOOM, MURAL
*By considering the nature of this workshop, all attendants are requested to put their video on during the workshop. Please attend to the workshop from an environment where there is stable and good internet connectivity.
How to apply the workshop
If you wish to join the workshop, please apply from the link below and fill out all necessary information.
https://forms.gle/umvTfgwjWXZQTspC9
Whether you can join the workshop or not will be informed to applicants after the application deadline.
Inquiry
Please contact Prof. Yamada/ToTAL below:
Email: yamada.k.be@m.titech.ac.jp
Room: Ookayama, S6-309B
（Last year’s workshop）
<References>
1. Facilitators:
●Thomas Both:
Thomas is a designer and design educator whose passion is helping people understand the practice of human-centered design–and their ability as designers–to innovate how they learn, think, and solve problems. He is director of the Designing for Social Systems program at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school) at Stanford University. In this program, he teaches professionals how to apply design thinking to complex social challenges and facilitates workshops for social impact leaders to develop a more human and strategic practice.
●David Janka:
Design consultant and creative strategist; former Fellow and current lecturer at the Stanford University d.school. David has a medical degree from Stanford and works to integrate design thinking principles into medical education, healthcare delivery, and medical device design.
●Scott Witthoft:
Professional space and product designer; Associate Professor of Practice at University of Texas at Austin; former Fellow and lecturer at the Stanford University d.school. Scott is author of the book “Make Space,” a tool for designing collaborative spaces. He has a professional background in structural engineering.
2. Comments from the students who joined the last year:
●Tokyo Tech M1: This course is a must do if you want to learn in a fun cooperative environment. The lecturers are super-friendly and professional!
●Tokyo Tech M2: It was a really fun, relaxing and interactive workshop. The workshop is very well-organized and it allows the participants to learn very effectively.
●Tokyo Tech D1: This workshop encourages engineers/scientists to be uncomfortable because we learn and view things from totally new and unstandardized perspective: design, where numbers and formula are replaced by circles and shades.
3. ToTAL’s aims and characteristics of this workshop:
●All Tokyo Tech students are expected to develop and execute new values for society when they become “professionals” in any fields. At ToTAL, we believe that the core of “leadership” is the motivation and skills to develop such new values for society proactively.
●The concepts of “Creative Confidence”, meaning that creativity is for everybody and anyone can generate new ideas, and “User Centric”, which is making new values to be accepted in society, are the fundamentals of Design Thinking. Establishing such concepts in your mind, developing logic and taking actions will lead to such new values.
●Although it is often understood that Design Thinking is a kind of method to generate “innovations” by following 5 steps; empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test, the core of Design Thinking is the 2 concepts above.
●This workshop aims to establish such 2 concepts in your brain and body. d.school tutors designed the agenda especially for Tokyo Tech to satisfy such aim, which is different from usual design thinking workshops of merely learning the 5 steps.
●During this 3-day workshop, students should try to understand and experience the mind-set of Creative Confidence and the skill-set of User Centric: exploring mechanism of needs and jump beyond logic, through d.school’s way of speedy, friendly and diversified learning environment.
4 . Reports on last year’s workshop:
(1) (in Japanese) https://www.total.titech.ac.jp/news/2021/11/202110design-thinking2.html
(2) (in Japanese) https://www.total.titech.ac.jp/news/2021/11/202110design-thinking.html
(3) (in English) https://www.total.titech.ac.jp/news/2022/01/202110-designthinking-report.html
<Inquiries>
Prof. K. Yamada, ToTAL
e-mail: yamada.k.be@m.titech.ac.jp TEL: 03-5734-2323
