Insights Event: Design Thinking: Approaches to Student Engagement

Design thinking offers new tools for decision making, problem solving, and ideation drawn from the business and digital realms. The approaches used within design thinking reflect the complexity and uncertainty brought about by the accelerated levels of innovation and change. Similar levels of complexity and change are also present in a higher education context. In a recent WONKHE article, some of the values and opportunities which design thinking offers in higher education have been explored.

The design thinking approach provides a range of tools for engaging students and staff in working collaboratively to find solutions. This session will provide staff working with students with new tools to open up spaces for discussion about inclusive education, curriculum design and other departmental challenges.

During this interactive and thought-provoking Insights event, Dr Bo Kelestyn, Senior Teaching Fellow and Director of Student Experience, University of Warwick, will guide you through the fundamentals of design thinking and help you consider how it can be used for co-creation in your work and institution. The session will focus on how design thinking can be used to create a dialogue and problem-solve in collaboration with students in the context described above.

You will also hear from Bo and other colleagues about their experiences of implementing design thinking for co-creation at the University of Warwick, the University of Exeter and Oxford Brookes University. By the end of the event, you will have a good understanding of what design thinking entails and how you can start using it for co-creation with your community.