One of the activities that gives us the greatest satisfaction is bringing ITS students closer to the Design Thinking methodology. It is an important opportunity for us to compare notes and for the students, we believe, an opportunity to enrich their wealth of experience and skills. So we could not fail to tell you what happened in the training tour that we have just started and will end in May cha has seen engaged in our Elena Masi and Michele Tagliavini, project manager, and Alice Rizzetto, Account Manager, with the students ofITS FITSTIC: Elena was in Bologna and lectured to the students of the course of videogames for the consumer market and for the industry, services and culture sectors, Michele in Carpi to the students of Formodena for the course Fashion Product Manager, and Alice was in Cesena with students in the course in Devops practices for the development, Deployment and management of applications in the Cloud environment.
At each venue we devoted the morning to a small introduction to the tools of Design Thinking, then went straight into practice with a well-known exercise: the 30 circles exercise from the book Creative Confidence: you test your creativity by transforming 30 circles into as many recognizable objects, in just 3 minutes. All you need is a pen and a sheet of paper with 30 empty circles of approximately the same size. This exercise is used to stimulate creativity, but it is also very useful as a warm-up exercise, before brainstorming and in the search for solutions.
We then asked everyone to make a portfolio: in pairs, they had to think about how to make a real portfolio for one of their clients. Then they interviewed their partner, received feedback, worked out solutions from the context and the real needs of the client. Then with scissors and cards in hand they built a prototype, finally presenting it to the class. The goal of this exercise was to use the main tools of Design Thinking in a quick and concrete way.
Doing these prototyping exercises, as long as they are quick, means starting to think like a designer. For many, this step is disorienting. Thinking like a designer does not mean designing aesthetically effective solutions. On the contrary, it means first reformulating the problem by taking the perspective of the possible customer/consumer and only then designing solutions.
Activating connections between talented young people attending ITS and established businesses is our daily work. Educational tools such as Design Thinking allow us to produce working prototypes from listening to and understanding end users and giving to businesses. Through this active experimentation, we are able to produce solutions that can innovate products and processes.
The students' reaction to this methodology has been extremely positive. We are really happy to have started this training that will see the Upskill 4.0 team engaged in the coming months with FITSTIC students!