Studying Design Thinking at the D-School in Potsdam

Foto: © HPI D-School

While working as an Innovation Coach at Mindshift.One, I am currently also enrolled in a Design Thinking certification program at the Hasso-Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany.
The institute is located in a rather quiet living area in Potsdam, but every Tuesday and Friday, the D-School building is shaking from the excitement of the students of the Basic Track.
​The certification program started in October 2018, for myself and 79 other participants, and kicked off with a first project phase right away.
​In addition to getting to know the method through small theoretical inputs and quickly going to work with it in the project, we are learning the importance of self-reflection as well as experiencing what it means to work in a diverse team. 

During the Basic Track, every single participant has the chance to gain experience in project work, gets better in doing interviews, learns how and when to iterate and more.
In short: we all get prepared for what could happen in projects later on.

During our project work one coach accompanies a team to help when needed, but still gives us the freedom to work on the challenges that occur in a project as a team. 
Today I want to tell you a bit more about the D-School days. I'd like to talk about one specific day, the prototyping festival:

In our current project, which we work on with a real project partner, we have reached the prototyping phase. In order to get to know different types of protoyping, the D-School organized a whole prototyping festival with different workshops on how to build a prototype. With music, a lot of fun and, of course, a festival outfit, myself and one teammate participated the workshop on how to build an interactive prototype with a Teensy board. After getting a short introduction on Teensy boards and doing some little exercises my teammate and I had two hours to build our prototype.

The goal was to create a product which can measure sound levels and then give the user real-time feedback.
In addition to that, we wanted to create a product which is easy to understand and easy to use.
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During the two hours of prototyping it was interesting to see how we needed to iterate our idea and confront ourselves with new questions we hadn't thought about before. This is because very often, we have a different imagination of what an idea looks like even though we all talk about the „same“ idea. Prototyping brings out these differences and helps us restore agreeement.

After our workshop session all participants of the Basic Track came together to present what they created to the others - a mix of big and small prototypes, little video clips, role plays and more.
As a next step we will test our prototypes with the target users and collect feedback in order to iterate on and improve our product.

As you can see studying at the HPI in Potsdam never gets boring and I learn something new here every day - something about team work, about design thinking or how to build an interactive prototype with a Teensy board.

This article was written by Coleen Dannroth
Read the full article in German here.