This microsite is designed to guide you through the essential phases of the human-centered design process: Explore, Frame, Create, and Deliver.
Below, you will find a variety of methods and tools to enhance your workshops and meetings, helping you to unlock creativity, foster collaboration, and drive impactful outcomes. Whether you're looking to gain new insights, redefine challenges, generate innovative ideas, or implement lasting change, our toolkit provides the resources you need to succeed.
Ensuring we understand the challenge we’re trying to tackle is a critical first step, and one which is often skipped to jump directly to brainstorming solutions. Throughout the design process, we must first focus on deeply exploring what is happening, determining the root causes, consider what ideas and resources already exist that can be reused, and developing a bold and hopeful vision of what the future might look like. As designers, we also need to reflect on our own role, and actively draw in perspectives that are different from ours.
Immersing yourself in an experience related to your mission enhances your understanding of it and enables you to see different perspectives by living the experience with a child-like curiosity.
A visual tool where all the work comes together in a strategic roadmap.
A guide for teams to identify resources, manage potential barriers, and establish a clear timeline for project execution.
A compiled report that serves to succinctly and effectively showcase your team's achievements and future plans to relevant sponsors.
A Stakeholder Map is used to identify, categorize, and analyze stakeholders in a project, to understand their interests, influence, and relationships.
A framework to initiate and establish a cohesive foundation for collaborative teamwork. Completing this canvas once you start working with your team serves to ensure a harmonious environment and collaboration.
A central place to capture insights from field trips and collect your observations and what you’ve heard and experienced.
A guide to help you prepare for your interviews in a focused yet flexible way. Use this guide to outline the topics you want to cover during interviews, and to clarify any assumptions you have around your mission.
To understand how to conduct interviews with key stakeholders related to your mission.
To arrange interview dates and venues, and remember key interview tasks.
To ask consent from the interviewees for the collection and processing of their personal interview data.
An analysis of information gathered during the design research phase. This process must be repeated for each interview conducted, such that each interview has its own Interview Download Canvas filled out.
Transitioning to a more regenerative world requires a shift from our conventional mindset. It involves crafting products, places, and services that embody fresh values and ignite collective behavioral change. We must allocate time and give ourselves the freedom to re-contextualize the problem, and provide a launchpad for innovative ideas.
The Persona Canvas serves to create a comprehensive profile of your target audience. It helps you develop a deep understanding of your users' needs, behaviors, and motivations, guiding your empathy interviews and further research.
To cluster and organize data to discover relationships between them, and to convert the data into knowledge and gain new awareness.
HMW questions serve as a launchpad to stimulate the development of multiple, less obvious ideas to solve a challenge or to move towards a common goal.
To turn research findings, information and data into well-crafted insights that point the way forward and inspire your team and others to innovate.
To identify clear opportunities based on your design research by understanding both the current reality and the desired future.
Start to create a series of actions and ideas that can connect with other interventions and help move towards a bigger goal. Some can be small practical steps and others can be big audacious ideas that might never happen but will help people reimagine what might be possible. This is about thinking big.
To move from a bundle of ideas into framing a robust and flexible solution concept that addresses your design challenge (mission) and makes it visual to enable feedback and refinement.
Fostering creativity and idea generation by encouraging both individual and team-based contributions for comprehensive solutions.
Design is about making things. Thinking systemically can feel overwhelming, so making things helps move you forward. It shows people what a new vision could be in a tangible way, so they can get behind it or add their ideas to it. Prototyping is an important way to test how your idea works, explore how it connects with other interventions, and see what emerges.
Define your assumptions and key questions to design your prototype.
To bring your best ideas together, by creating a low-fidelity narrative that shows how people will experience the key features of your solution.
Low-fidelity narratives that visually articulate ideas and illustrate how people will experience key features of a solution.
The process of transforming ideas into tangible representations or prototypes, thereby fostering effective communication and enabling you to test your idea with target audiences and stakeholders.
Refining your concepts and solutions by iteratively testing and gathering feedback on your prototypes, thereby enhancing your overall design through ongoing improvement.
To share your prototype with the people you’re designing for, solicit their feedback, continue to iterate, and incorporate learnings into your solution.
To share stories of empathy, help your team bring empathy into individual efforts and teamwork.
To immediately include everyone in the search for understanding, ideas and answers – no matter how large your group.
To help you gain insights on issues you face and unleash group wisdom for addressing these issues. Peer-to-peer coaching helps with discovering everyday solutions, revealing patterns, and refining prototypes.
To create a productive way of engaging with one another during gatherings, and to build loose yet powerful connections by asking relevant questions.
To effectively communicate your ideas and projects by using different elements of stories to enhance your ability to craft compelling narratives, engage audiences, and convey the impact of your work.
To think collectively of behaviors you want to strive for and to avoid within your team and the project you’re working on. By the end, you’ll have a social contract which you’ve agreed to with all the members within your team.
To explore the group's differing views, needs or decisions around an issue, and to help people make decisions and discuss differences.
To help groups understand what happened, why it mattered, and what actions need to follow, thereby eliminating misunderstandings and helping teams continuously align.
To quickly and easily prioritize ideas, involving all members of a group in making a choice and preparing decisions. By applying dots for individual aspects or suggestions, a visual trend is created within a few minutes.
To get inspired, free up your thinking and tap into fresh perspectives, by exploring creative constraints and analogies.
To ideate quickly during a design sprint or workshop, sketching eight ideas in eight minutes, pushing beyond early ideas and generating a wide variety of solutions.
To gain in-depth insights, new findings, and information in order to grasp the problem or situation holistically or simply to find relevant questions for an interview. Intuitively, the 5W+H Questions are question words starting with a W or H: Who? What? When? Where? Why? and How?
To sketch your idea as a low-fidelity (low-fi) prototype using pen and paper.
To activate your paper prototypes and simulate your persona’s actions through digital interfaces.
To understand the inner critics or "Tiny Monsters" that hold us back from taking risks, doing things differently, problem-solving in new ways, having courage, and more.