Syllabus
Design Thinking Fundamentals A – TOKYO TECH OCW
Course description and aims
This class provides students an opportunity to learn the knowledge and the capability needed in “Design Thinking” approach through intensive lectures and practices of a long-term project. The class starts with the question, “What is Design Thinking?”. The students are requested to understand and master the way of thinking in “Design Thinking” approach about how to find and solve the problem from the fundamental level. The knowledge and skill obtained in this class is highly related to the following projects related to engineering design. When engineers faces various problems, they must know how to solve them with strong viewpoint of key issues in problems. Therefore, students learn fundamental five steps; Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test, and understand how to use the steps through basic exercises. They also experience the iterating processes from “finding potential user needs” to “ideating as making solutions to problems”.
Student learning outcomes
The goal is to understand the fundamental five steps of “Design Thinking” approach; Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test, through lectures and practices of a long-term project.
Class flow
Students are supposed to have group work under instructors’ supervision. The class style is Project-Based-Learning (PBL). In this Monday course, lectures are given mainly in English.
Textbook(s)
Each instructor specifies textbooks.
Assessment criteria and methods
Each instructor specifies criterion and methods for assessment.
Lecture
We will use online tools below:
- Discord
- Zoom
- Miro
Theme
Design a new experience in the house through prototyping a new tangible (physical) product.
Schedule
[DTFa-1] 6/22（Mon）13:30-17:05（break 15:10-15:25）
- Guidance
- Design Thinking Overview
[DTFa-2] 6/29（Mon）13:30-17:05（break 15:10-15:25）
- Empathize
- User Research
[DTFa-3] 7/06（Mon）13:30-17:05（break 15:10-15:25）
- define(1)
- ideate(1)
[DTFa-4] 7/13（Mon）13:30-17:05（break 15:10-15:25）
- define(2)
- ideate(2)
[DTFa-5] 7/20（Mon）13:30-17:05（break 15:10-15:25）
- storytelling
- user test
[DTFa-6] 8/03（Mon）13:30-17:05（break 15:10-15:25）
- pitch
- preparing for the presentation
[DTFa-7] 8/08（Sat）13:30-17:05（break 15:10-15:25）
- presentation
- ⚠️ WARNING: It will be held on Saturday instead of Monday because it’s together with dtf-b class.
