Tag Archives: boot camp

Design thinking can inspire engineers, if customized as a corporate training program

Rebecca Ackermann wrote “Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong? An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.” In this MIT Technology Review article, she claimed that design thinking disappointed us.

But in recent years, for a number of reasons, the shine of design thinking has been wearing off. Critics have argued that its short-term focus on novel and naive ideas has resulted in unrealistic and ungrounded recommendations. And they have maintained that by centering designers—mainly practitioners of corporate design within agencies—it has reinforced existing inequities rather than challenging them.  

Although design thinking *process* rarely produces market-shaking products, design thinking *training* shakes the way people think. When carefully customized, it encourages engineers to be customer-centric and think outside the box. More details about how LG Academy customized a design thinking training is available upon request.
Figure 1 The overall structure and time allocation of the d.school’s design thinking training program

Bertao, R. A., Jung, C. H, Chung, J., and Joo, J. (2023), Design thinking: a customized blueprint to train R & D personnnel in creative problem solving., Thinking Skills and Creativity, 48, 101253.

Abstract

Organizations have sought to adopt design thinking aiming at innovation. However, implementing such a creative problem-solving approach based on designers’ mindsets and practices requires the navigation of obstacles. Corporate structure and culture hinder the adoption course, and cognitive barriers affect non-designer engagement. In this regard, training has been used as a means of easing the process. Although considered a crucial step in design thinking implementation, research on training initiatives is scarce in the literature. Most studies mirror that about d.school boot camp and innovative programs developed by companies globally remain unknown. This practice-oriented paper investigates a training blueprint tailored for LG Corporation in South Korea, targeting R & D personnel working in several affiliates that needed creative problem-solving skills to improve business performance. The study findings unveil a customized initiative that expanded the established boot camp model by adding preceding activities to increase learning opportunities and enable empathetic observation. Fundamentally, the customization strategy aimed to provide participants with customer-oriented tools to solve business problems. In addition, the training program reframed the design thinking steps in order to make it relevant for employees and foster corporate implementation goals. Ultimately, this case study supplies literature describing a training blueprint to disseminate design thinking considering two dimensions: individual adoption and organizational implementation challenges.

Keywords

design thinking, creative problem-solving, boot camp, training, customer orientation

Figure 2. The overall structure and time allocation of the LG Academy’s design thinking training program
Figure 3. Structure and process of the LG Academy’s design thinking pre-boot camp
Table 5 The LG Academy’s training blueprint

How should we customize design thinking training program for engineers?  

Bertao, R. A., Jung, C. H., and Joo, J. (2022). Identifying inconveniences in daily life: a problem finding prompt to foster non-designers’ engagement in design thinking training. In Gabriela Goldschmidt and Ezri Tarazi (Ed.), 13th Design Thinking Research Symposium, Expanding the Frontiers of Design: A Blessing or a Curse? (pp. 354-368). Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa: Israel.

Abstract

In general, companies use training programs to implement design thinking’s creative problem-solving approach and encourage employees to adopt it. However, non-designers face individual barriers when joining such initiatives and experience challenges related to the implementation of regular practices in organizations. This paper conducts a case study of a design thinking training program developed by LG Corporation and explores a particular perspective applied in the initial phases of the design thinking methodology—namely, problem finding via empathetic observation. The initiative focused on helping non-designers develop the skills to identify customer inconveniences that may require design thinking’s problem-solving attitude. The program blueprint encompassed a preceding activity designed to increase awareness of design thinking methodology via immersion in customer issues and utilized innovative strategies to promote participant engagement in training.

Keywords

design thinking, training, boot camp, problem finding, LG Corporation.