Why Design Thinking matters in today’s world

9 May 2024

• Applications now open for free or 90% funded Postgraduate Diploma in Innovation through Design Thinking.
• Dr Tom Spalding and Dr Briony Supple, UCC Department of Education, explain the importance of Design Thinking.

Human beings have developed multiple shortcuts and assumptions for solving everyday problems, which, most of the time, appear to solve them. However, in other cases the problem’s roots are concealed behind layer upon layer of issues, making the understanding of complex situations highly opaque.

We might question the design of these systems and machines. However, ‘design’ can be something of a dirty word. To some it implies superficial styling to make something appear essential. To others the adjective ‘design’ can imply expense or elitism. When a designer is involved, so the cynics would say, the price goes up and practicality down. The Ego has landed.

In fact, a good designer thinks as much about the end user as the client, whilst balancing the outcomes with budgetary and other restrictions. Today, and for the foreseeable future, first amongst those are climate change, massive alterations to migration patterns and increasing pressure on the planet’s resources. In fact in the 1960s, those who thought about design (including Victor Papernek) were amongst the first to start questioning the relationships between consumer culture, design and the environment.

So what is ‘design thinking’, and where could that help us?

Design thinking is a collection of mental and (sometimes) material techniques and ideas drawn from a range of disciplines which share the aim of shaking those who are prepared to engage with them out of habitual ways of considering complex problems. Drawing from educational theory, the practice of designers working in a variety of organisations, life coaching, marketing and business innovation, design thinking encourages us to challenge ourselves, and put the welfare of human beings at the centre of innovation, service provision and social enterprise and to collaboratively build a better future.

The Postgraduate Diploma in Innovation through Design Thinking at UCC introduces students to the idea of a ‘problem space’ where they attempt to get to the roots of a particular issue, rather than simply characterise issues in a two-dimensional way, or consider them as a traditional ‘designer’s brief’. Likewise, the solution may not be THE solution at all, but a range of ideas within a ‘solution space’, which require untangling and development through iteration.

A project completed during postgraduate diploma is not necessarily going to change the world, but the re-wiring of a student’s preconceptions and their understanding of the nature of problems in a holistic way is a transferable skill which can be applied to other challenges, professional and personal which they may face, and transcends any disciplinary or subject specific boundary.

Design thinking matters because humanity is facing a set of unprecedented challenges. The only way to fully understand and solve these issues is by embracing a human-centred methodology for real change.

Applications now open

The PG Dip in Innovation through Design Thinking, which starts in September 2024, is now open for applications.

Places will be subsidised under the Human Capital Initiative (HCI) Pillar 1 with 100% Subsidised Fee (no course fees payable by applicant) or 90% Subsided Fee (€825 payable by the applicant). 

Graduates of the Postgraduate Diploma in Innovation Through Design Thinking, who have passed all modules within the PG Diploma and have received an aggregate mark of 50%, will be eligible to progress to the MA Innovation Through Design Thinking