Abstract:

Design thinking, with its focus on developing products, services and experiences that customer want, has universal appeal to any organisation that wants to remain relevant.

Triggering transformative, mind-set changes can be carefully orchestrated through pedagogical crafting in the classroom, the intention is this leads to development of knowledge and skills and the change of behaviours, ultimately transforming the organisational culture. However in practice it is often the strong established organisational culture that reset behaviours that re-establishes the pre-existing culture. Truly transformative change may remain as a pipe dream as the organisational tasks of today occupy the time.

A blended pedagogical method of delivering professional level education has been developed to playfully provoke curiosity. The challenge for educationalist in this domain is to find ways of supporting individuals to maintain the commitment and energy required to overcome the pressure to deliver felt by the existing organisation to create space to design and develop better ways of doing things.

This work evaluates the effectiveness of a short programme, Student Engaged Service Design. This programme is two half day interventions delivered a month apart to professionals in a Higher Education Institution supplemented by mobile delivery of prompts, reminders and playful activities over the course of the month between face to face deliveries.

An evaluation scale was developed by interviewing experts in the field of design to determine what might be expected from such a programme and how effective the programme was at delivering these outcomes.

This work forms the foundation of radically re-conceptualising the classroom as personalised for the learner and free from traditional physical and resource constraints. It attempts to be led by the outcome desired by the learner rather than the methods we have at our disposal to teach.

Keywords:

Design Thinking, Innovation.