Hi, I'm Jeanne Liedtka, and I'd like to welcome you to our specialization in design thinking. I'm a professor at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business. I'll introduce myself as well as some of my great design colleagues in more detail as our classes together get started. But first, I wanted to share with you a short introduction to our specialization. Give you an overview of what to expect, talk about the four courses involved, and then talk a bit about how we'll be learning together. First, great decision. In my research here at Darden, I've been studying design thinking practice for more than 10 years. I've come to believe it has a superpower to unleash the creative thinker within all of us and to make us more open-minded, collaborative, and adaptable in the process. It brings us a new toolkit that is absolutely essential in this crazy, ever-changing world we live in. The work we'll be doing together will move you beyond the superficial learning that events like one day hackathons provide. Instead, completing this specialization will give you a deep competency that will equip you to achieve the transformational results that design thinking done well is capable of. I know that many of you have already taken one of our introductory courses on design thinking. Maybe you've taken design thinking for innovation or design thinking for the greater good. In this specialization, we'll build on the concepts and stories we shared in those courses by working through four new courses together. Each of these courses has a practical hands-on approach that will move you beyond just understanding the concepts to building your actual practice skills. As we move through project work and exercises. We'll begin our journey with Design Thinking 1, Insights to Inspiration. This class focuses on DT's front end discovery process. It will lead you through a carefully structured set of steps that start with identifying the right problem to solve. Then using ethnographic tools to develop a deep understanding of the people you're designing for. Then finally, digging deep to uncover new insights and design criteria that pave the way for truly creative solutions. At the conclusion of DT1, you'll have a choice about which courses to take next. I'd suggest that you then take Design Thinking, Ideas to Action. Here we'll examine how to master DT's backend and learn to generate more creative ideas, prototype them, and design and conduct experiments to see if they work as well as you think they do. Taken together, these two courses give you an overview of the entire design thinking cycle from beginning to end. Next, I'd suggest that you move on to deepen your expertise with key tools by taking our discovery tools course. Here, you'll get to work with some of my wonderful design colleagues hosted by my coauthor and friend Tim Ogilvie. Discovery tools focuses on five critical tools widely used during the front end of the design process. Journey mapping, job to be done, the creation of personas, stakeholder mapping, and value chain analysis. Our capstone course in the specialization, will be experiencing design, deepening your design practice. In our previous three classes, we focused on learning the design thinking tools and methods, and we practice them in the context of a project. But in this final class, the project is you. We examined the shifts in mindsets and skill sets that design thinkers experience at a personal level. You'll have a chance to assess your own competencies and create your own personal development plan to continue your learning on the design thinking journey. Because even though you've completed our specialization, the journey never ends. For those of you who'd like to take a more detailed walk through these four courses and how they fit together, please check out our curriculum map video. We are going to have so much fun together and we're going to learn a lot in the process. Because design thinking is not only useful, it is joyful. Are you ready to get started then onto Design Thinking 1, Insights to Inspiration.
