Design Thinking Workshops
Design thinking is a process that facilitate the art of critical thinking into a creative end product. It was originally developed by Standford D.School and has since been in use in various fields. The BioTrick project decided to use this as part of their process to ignite creative thinking in the participant the triangular consisting of students, teachers and supervisors as well as the geographic triangular of Finland, Norway and Portugal.
The following elements were identified as challenges that need to be addressed within the BLS academy. Helping and supporting individual organizations to improve with digital learning tools but also to have generic solutions on a global scale.
We are hosting a Design thinking workshop in each one of the partner countries and then combining and further developing the initial results, we are having a fourth workshop including participants from the three countries.
The design challenges for the individual workshops were:
Improvement of sharing of knowledge between teachers, supervisors, students and practitioners on a digital platform that will promote active continuous learning on a global scale.
The first Design Thinking workshop was held in Turku. This workshop was done with a collection of 9 people consisting of representatives of all three stakeholders in the triangle of students, supervisors and teachers. The participants were actively involved and we had amazing results from the group, the amount of creativity within a group of professionals that usually have a very analytical way of work and thinking was astounding.
The second workshop was supposed to be in Bergen but due to the Corona pandemic, we moved it online. We had a total of 15 people with the same triangular integration of teachers, supervisors and students.
Moving online was a unique experience. We made up a pack of craft materials for each one of the participants which was delivered to them the day before. During the two days we made use of main sessions and breakout rooms. The solutions were again phenomenal even with being online and we received good feedback from the participants on working online.
Even within the Corona struggle we managed to conduct face to face workshops in Coimbra, Portugal. We had a group of 10 participants with a triangular balance of students, supervisors and teachers.
The two days spent with the group yielded very innovative results. We posed an extra challenge to the group to also take the elements from the local challenges and create a global solution to address these within the community of practice. They rose to the challenge and were presented again with amazing innovations.
In order to get a true triangular experience between the partner countries and the three core representation of participants, Teachers, Supervisors and students we had a collaborative online Design Thinking session. In this session participants were grouped together from different countries and different representation. Together making use of some very intuitive online tools they collaboratively designed new ideas to address the issues raised in the previous workshops.