Design Thinking for Local Businesses

Join our Design Thinking workshop series to turn your product or service ideas into market-ready solutions.

Through two user-centred workshops - Inspiration and Ideation, you’ll gain deep customer insights, create and refine prototypes, and test them for real-world impact. Led by Dr Camilo Soler Caicedo, Lecturer in Critical and Historical Studies at Kingston School of Art, this workshop series is perfect for small, local, or growing businesses to learn how to innovate with confidence and bring their ideas to life faster.

These workshops are brought to you as part of the BIG South London Business, Innovation & Growth Programme, delivered by Kingston University and funded by the UK Shared Prosperity Fund.

Key outcomes of the workshops include:

• A developed sense of empathy for customers/users with a Customer Insights Plan (CIP).
• An approach to gather customer insights via observation, interaction or informal conversation for Customer Insight Analysis (CIA).
• A first low-resolution Product Initial Prototype (PIP) test to verify assumptions in interaction with customers.
• A prototype to test in real conditions and a Plan for Iteration and Actioning (PIA) guide to keep testing and improving it.

Info: We will learn from our customers and get the right inspiration for what we want to do based on the audience we want to add value to. We will leave the workshop with some ideas on what we need to know from our customers so we can progress our product idea. Activities include:

Info: The five stages of design thinking: Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test.

Info: How much do we know them?

Info: What can we offer?

Info: What do we need to know?

Info: How can we find out what we don't know?

Info: We will come up with great new ideas to develop our original product based on the analysis of what we learnt from customers. We will leave with an initial ultra-low-cost prototype to test and further refine those ideas into something desired, doable, and promising. Activities include:

Info: What did we observe and ask? Were the answers what we expected? What was obvious? What was new?

Info: How can we better address the needs and wants of our customers? What needs changing in the idea?

Info: What needs updating in our initial canvas from last session?

Info: We will develop a “creative” low-resolution test prototype by drawing and sketching the ideas derived from the insights. With the user at the centre, what is the simplest version or dummy product we could run to check how our customers would react? The quicker and simpler to implement, the merrier.

Info: We will learn how to chat with our customers about ideas without leading them, but rather learning from them.

Also check out other Workshops in Kingston upon Thames, Arts events in Kingston upon Thames, Fine Arts events in Kingston upon Thames.