The Design Thinkers Academy is launching in the UK to offer design thinking training for leadership teams at large organisations. The academy was founded in Amsterdam in 2011, and has spent the last 5 years working with hundreds of organisations, helping them to integrate design thinking into their businesses.
The academy’s UK arm is opening in London, and will be led by former Design Council CEO David Kester. It's offering courses led by the likes of Joe Ferry, Brand and Experience Architect at Merlin Entertainments Group, and Arnoud Koning, Global Business Services Manage, and a design thinking champion at Proctor & Gamble. Businesses the academy has worked with so far include Coca-Cola, L’Oreal and Mastercard, and the list continues to grow.
“Design thinking drives people to look through the eyes of their customers so they can serve them better”
Design Thinkers Academy UK is offering a series of open and bespoke courses; the first open course is a Design Thinkers Bootcamp being held on 18-22 April. A previous bootcamp was held in London last June by the organisation, and proved very successful. The organisation is also partnering with the Design Museum’s Learning Department to offer a set of courses aimed at young people and educators.
Design Thinkers London Bootcamp 2015
David Kester, Managing Partner at Design Thinkers Academy London, said: “Design thinking drives people to look through the eyes of their customers so they can serve them better. It’s increasingly being adopted by some of the most successful businesses in the world. We want to help organisations excel at design thinking and innovate.” Arne van Oosterom, Senior Partner and Co-Founder at Design Thinkers Group, added: “We are delighted to be launching a new centre of excellence in London, a leading creative and commercial capital in Europe – and to be working with the Design Museum. Our Group’s mission is to help people ‘learn-by-doing’ and strengthen their creative problem-solving abilities. The launch of a new London hub extends our reach and is a significant step towards this goal.”
“We are delighted to be launching a new centre of excellence in London, a leading creative and commercial capital in Europe”
Design Thinking refers quite simply to the design-specific cognitive activities that designers apply during the design process. The notion can be traced to Herbert A. Simon's 1969 book “The Sciences of the Artificial,” and Robert McKim's 1973 book “Experiences in Visual Thinking,” as well as Peter Rowe's 1987 book “Design Thinking,” which described methods and approaches used by architects and urban planners, and was a significant early usage of the term in the design research literature.
Design thinking is essentially a formal method for practical, creative problem resolution. Differing from more analytical, scientific methods, which begin with thoroughly defining all the parameters of the problem in order to create a solution, design thinking identifies and investigates with both known and ambiguous aspects of the current situation in order to discover hidden parameters and open alternative paths which may lead to the goal.
Research Day @ Design Thinkers Bootcamp
