Courses

Courses and workshops developed to help learners, both academic and professional, to critically engage in contemporary design discourse and practice.

These courses can be purchased for independent delivery or contracted for supported facilitation. Please inquire for pricing.

Introduction to Service Design

This introduction to the discipline of Service Design dives about where we started and where we are now, to give a full contextual understanding to the power of designing services. The tangible outcomes from this course include a full stack of service design tools that you can test out and learn to adapt for your own purposes. This course also has a complementary project to apply theory to practice entitled “Acts of Service” – a great project to run as a quick jam or more considered and long term

Behavioural Archetypes

Personas began as a tool for market differentiation largely using demographic data such as age, gender, occupation in an attempt to personify market segments into singular users. This way of designing for people has been widely critiqued and now more and more we see a shift into behavioural archetypes as a way of understanding the nuanced differences of folks from different perspectives, experiences, or positions within a given context. This course shows how analysis tools can help identify and capture such psychographics and then be leveraged to better design with complexities in mind.

Analysis: Insight to Opportunity

Design Research is an essential step to making things that really matter. The era of the design genius holed up away from looking eyes is long gone and participatory engagement with vitak stakeholders is the new normal. How do you ensure that you not only honour the contributions of your stakeholders but also ensure the outcomes of the work together really reflect the inputs provided? Creative analysis tools are frameworks to ensure you capture the deeper value of your qualitative data and frame it effectively

Participatory Engagement

Participatory design has found solid footing in the design world as a means to get far more robust and insightful input direct from customers and beneficiaries. This course offers easy principles to ensure you have checked the boxes of meaningful engagement and offers case studies to inspire you to move beyond the simple mainstays of surveys, questionnaires, and interviews. Creative methods can help you ask better questions in a way that allows your participants to give deeper more meaningful and often more honest responses.

Critical Making: Ideas to Ideation

At a time when design thinking seems to have taken over every boardroom and business meeting it is important to be reminded that thinking is not enough and that we must also find pathways to take thought into action and ideas into conception and then implementation. This is a great course to help push your practice out of the comforts of discussions and theory and transforming ideas into reality by making and creating using tangible and meaningful material practices. This course comes with a reading list.

Co-Design and Facilitation

Co-design has recently become the gold standard for participatory practice and more industries are seeing the benefits of bringing stakeholders and beneficiaries into the design process. But this democratization of power is delicate and requires the right balance of facilitation and freedom of expression. This course will show you how to make the shift from being a big D Designer creating in isolation to taking on a role of facilitating design for those with contextual expertise and lived experience. How you frame that creation requires keen design knowledge and facilitation practice.