On successful completion of this module, students should be able to:
• Demonstrate an in-depth practical understanding of the five stages of Design Thinking and their interdependence.
• Recognize the appropriate application of Design Thinking and develop an appreciation for its benefits and limits across agriculture and food disciplines and other sectors.
• Practice the Design Thinking process by applying the method’s skills of empathy, creativity, idea selection, facilitating teamwork, rapid prototyping, iterative design, pitching and story-telling.
• Demonstrate the application of the five stages of Design Thinking in the context of a complex ‘real world’ agriculture/food industry challenge.
• Apply reflective practices to identify lessons learnt about the project, the process and the teamwork.
• Develop the ability to make sound judgements regarding timing, process and number of iterations of Design Thinking appropriate for a particular problem and be able to guide others to enhance outcomes.

The 5 Steps of the Design Thinking Process

1) Empathise: The first stage of the Design Thinking process is to gain an empathic understanding of the problem which is trying to be solved. This involves consulting experts to find out more about the area of concern through observing, engaging and empathising with people to understand their experiences and motivations, as well as immersing yourself in the physical environment so you can gain a deeper personal understanding of the issues involved.

2) Define: During the Define stage, the team put together the information which has been created and gathered during the Empathise stage. This is where the team will analyse your observations and synthesise them in order to define the core problems that you and your team have identified up to this point.

3) Ideate: During the Ideation stage of the Design Thinking process, the team are ready to start generating ideas. You’ve grown to understand your users and their needs in the Empathise stage, and you’ve analysed and synthesised your observations in the Define stage, and ended up with a human-centred problem statement. With this solid background, you and your team members can start to "think outside the box" to identify new solutions to the problem statement you’ve created, and you can start to look for alternative ways of viewing the problem

4) Prototyping: The design team will now produce a number of inexpensive, scaled down versions of the product or specific features found within the product, so they can investigate the problem solutions generated in the previous stage. Prototypes may be shared and tested within the team itself, in other departments, or on a small group of people outside the design team. This is an experimental phase, and the aim is to identify the best possible solution for each of the problems identified during the first three stages.

5) Test: The team now test the complete product using the best solutions identified during the prototyping phase. This is the final stage of the 5 stage-model, but in an iterative process, the results generated during the testing phase are often used to redefine one or more problems and inform the understanding of the users, the conditions of use, how people think, behave, and feel, and to empathise. Even during this phase, alterations and refinements are made in order to rule out problem solutions and derive as deep an understanding of the product and its users as possible.

Not applicable to this module.

• Feedback individually to students, post-assessment
• Self-assessment activities

Individual feedback is available upon request.